


Seventeen

by scapegrace74



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-23
Updated: 2018-09-25
Packaged: 2019-07-15 19:37:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 16
Words: 29,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16069883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scapegrace74/pseuds/scapegrace74
Summary: Have you ever made a list?  A way to compile all the missed opportunities, the transgressions, the warning signs telling you that you’re on the wrong path?  Of course you have.  This story is Mulder's list.





	1. Andy

**Author's Note:**

> The story is the Mulder/other to end all Mulder/others. In it, I try to explore how Mulder's sexual relationships shaped (and mis-shaped) him as a man. Each chapter represents a different partner, and the chapters are in chronological order.  
> For those who love their MSR, I'll give the ending away and state that's where this story is going. Bear with me.  
> Finally, there are several depictions of underage and non-consensual sex. I'll mark the relevant chapters, in case you want to skip them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: under-aged sex.

Andy. Properly, Andrea McLintock, but she was just Andy to him. At fifteen, she was a startling two inches taller than his own beanpole physique and on the road towards a NCAA basketball scholarship. Her family lived a half mile down the street, and in Chilmark that made them practically neighbours. He’s not certain when it started, but she started joining the informal pick-up games outside his house. The other boys had scoffed, but one drive down the lane and over the head of Jimmy B. to the net, and their chauvinist dissent had cooled. From thenceforth, Andy was one of the guys.

And that’s how he thought of her. One of the guys. Besides her height, Andy wore no make-up, kept her hair in a shaggy pageboy, and wore loose athletic clothing. He felt none of his usual stuttering incompetence towards the fairer sex when Andy was around, and therefore considered her genderless. Sometimes it was just the two of them, playing Horse or shooting the shit. She often came by after dinner, and they dribbled and lollygagged until the intermittent amber coronas of the streetlights no longer lit the net, returning reluctantly to their respective houses, each for their own reasons.

One such evening in late August, they were sitting on the berm of sedge grass that bounded the vacant lot across from the Mulder residence, knees tucked under their chins. He hadn’t seen it coming at all. Andy had mocked his chances of playing varsity ball, he’d shoulder-checked her a bit too hard, and the next thing he knew, he was pressed against her prone body, the cool earth under his palms a striking contrast to the flare of heat in his gut.

Something triumphant flared in her eyes as she felt him harden through his track pants. A tidal bore of lust washed out from his groin, making his extremities tingle. It was 1976, and he wasn’t a prude, but he’d been raised in the church of Nice Boys Don’t, so his first emotional response was mortification. Then Andy wrapped her endless legs around his hips and ground soft and easy against him in a way no mattress could duplicate. It dawned on him that maybe Nice Girls Do, and that it was time to consider converting.

There wasn’t much talk. There wasn’t much anything, in truth. He had just enough sense to glance up and down the street, making sure they were hidden by the deepening shadows of dusk. Instinct was a compulsory master, and it moved his hand inside Andy’s Celtics jersey where he found her small breasts encased in soft cotton. He pawed frantically at the material until she drew his mouth to hers with an insistent tug on his hair.

Someone had replaced his blood with naphtha, and he was burning up from the inside. Her mouth tasted like liquor stolen from his father’s cabinet - that illicit, that sweet. He was humping against her mons while she panted into his mouth when his hands slipped under his waistband and onto his ass. No, not his hands. His hands were occupied - one was plucking her nipple while the other cramped under his full weight. Andy’s hands were long-fingered with short nails, just like his. Andy’s hands were worn rough from a summer’s worth of free throws, just like his. But when they slid between their bodies and grasped his cock, Andy’s hands were nothing like his own. They were tentative, but fluid, and he needed to come so suddenly his eyes watered.

He couldn’t have stopped if he’d tried, so it was a good thing she didn’t ask him to. His track pants and briefs made it as far as his knees, and Andy’s plain white panties dangled from her right ankle like a flag of surrender when he pushed inside her. It was everything and nothing like he’d imagined. He felt that first plunge from a million miles away, orbiting the Earth like some satellite of sexual awakening. It occurred belatedly that he might be hurting her, so he glanced down into her face, abruptly transformed and beautiful. Her eyes were closed, her lower lip pinched between her teeth, but there were no obvious signs of distress, and that was all the concern he could spare.

Four quick slides into heaven, and on the fifth he was gone, riding the liquid roller coaster of his orgasm until it left him spent and shaking. Beneath him, Andy sighed. It was of primordial importance to understand the nuance of that sigh.

“Andy… uh, Andrea?” he tried.

She laughed, and he felt her inner musculature squeeze his penis as it languished in the warm bath of his…

“Jesus Christ, Andy, we didn’t use anything!” 

“Fox…”

“Fuck, how could I have been so stupid!” he continued without hearing her.

“Fox…”

“Shit, do you need me to… I dunno, take you to the doctor or something?”

She laughed again, and he slipped from her body.

“Fox, listen to me. It’s okay. I’m on the pill.”

He felt the air leak out of him like a ruptured balloon, images of teenage fatherhood disappearing like ghosts into the evening air.

“Oh, thank god.” He rolled to his back and stared at the stars while he waited for the bells in his head to stop pealing. 

Andy shifted beside him, modestly pulling her clothing back on. Good fucking god, he was no longer a virgin. He was blindsided by pride and, perversely, fear. He’d inadvertently crossed over the bridge into adulthood, and there was no turning back. 

It occurred to him that Andy was probably feeling much the same way, so he struggled to think of a way to broach the topic, feeling tongue-tied all of a sudden around her.

“Are you… okay?” There. That was sufficiently open-ended to invite intimate disclosures, if she felt the need.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine.” Fine. What did that mean? He had no illusions regarding his sexual technique, and no woman had ever come from ten seconds of coitus, but was she in pain? Laughing on the inside? God, he had a lifetime of arcane female cryptology ahead of him, didn’t he?

“That’s, that’s good.”

“Was I your first?” She blushed at once, and he mirrored it.

“I think the answer’s pretty obvious, Andy,” he muttered dryly. “Was, umm, was this your…?”

Before he could finish his sentence, she was on her feet and hastening towards the lamplit street.

“I really have to get going, or else my dad’ll get mad.”

He pulled up his pants and followed her, alarmed at her sudden departure. Mr. McLintock’s temper was formidable, especially since his wife left him with two teenage daughters to raise, so he couldn’t fault Andy’s logic, but something wasn’t sitting right.

“Yeah. Wait. Andy, wait! Are you sure you’re okay? I mean, I didn’t, um, hurt you or anything, did I?” 

Skin magazines were blissfully silent on the notion of foreplay, but he knew enough to know it hurt the girl if she wasn’t turned on enough, even if she wasn’t a virgin, and he’d barely touched Andy before he got his rocks off inside of her. God, he was a jerk. And while he’d never participated in the locker room rite of measuring his cock, he knew he wasn’t small. His education at the College of Larry Flynt had taught him that much.

She turned and walked back to him in the crepuscular nearness of night. Without so much as a word, she kissed him sweetly on the lips, the type of kiss that had been sadly missing before.

“Goodnight, Fox.” she whispered, and then walked in her boyish way down the block until he could no longer make out her outline.

***

He saw her again, of course. She still showed up for their pick-up games, and his buddies wondered at his sudden clumsiness, his unwillingness to body check their adversary. She was unchanged, except she never came by to see him alone anymore. He examined that fact from every possible angle, and concluded that she was worried he’d make another move on her. If that were the case, her concerns weren’t unfounded.

Junior year started, and they both made the varsity basketball teams. She was there in the gym, her hair a sweaty mop, her sports shorts clinging to her ass. It was a wonder he ever managed to make a shot.

And then, in January, she was gone. Transferred to the mainland, the coach said. Better prospects for scouting, living with her mother. By then, he had other things on his mind.


	2. Nicole

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: under-aged sex.

Nicole Watts came from the wrong side of the tracks. If there had been train tracks on Martha’s Vineyard, that is. Oh, it’s not like her family collected food stamps or dumpster dove or anything. But in the rarefied air of snobby New England, she was an outsider. Everything about her manner, upon arriving during his junior year, indicated she couldn’t give a fuck. Naturally, he fell fast and hard.

It was bad enough being fifteen in the tenth grade, as one by one all the other guys in his class received their driver’s permits in one hand and the keys to hand-me-down Buicks and Cadillacs with roomy back seats in the other. But the real tragedy was still having to take the school bus from Chilmark to Oak Bluffs with the rest of the lower school and the few kids whose parents were too poor to give them a car. 

Martha’s Vineyard had one high school, and one school bus that served the entire island. It passed the end of his street at 7:05 every weekday morning. He used to spend the next hour dozing, or finishing his homework. Then Nicole’s mother took over as the manager of a run-down motel up State Road in Aquinnah, and his worldview changed. That bus could drive to Jupiter, for all he cared, just as long as he got to sit close enough to smell the Love’s Baby Soft wafting from her skin and to watch her hands as she doodled on her binder or tore ever-larger holes into her ripped jeans.

Nicole had wavy blond hair and loved bubble gum-hued lip gloss. Nicole wore thrift store cast-offs with enough chutzpah to make them seem chic. Nicole favoured large safety pins over buttons, Doc Martins over sneakers, and if anyone had the nerve to escalate from condescending nostril-flaring to outright name-calling, she skewered them with a kohl-lined pale blue eye and lifted both middle fingers in a tandem salute. Eventually the name-calling subsided, but she never fit in, and he suspected she liked it that way.

Nicole was petite. Nicole had perky breasts that no Wonderbra could tame. Nicole put out, or at least that was the rumour. He’d heard his mother tsking about it in the drawing room with her Ladies Brigade sisters, whispering about that harlot Sheila Watts who was making her way through the volunteer fire department. And her daughter. No better, they said. But what can you expect, with a mother like that, they said. He considered his father; drunk, morally corrupt and emotionally distant, and decided he and Nicole were meant to be a couple. 

The next Monday, he sat directly behind her on the bus and hung his long arms over the back of her seat.

“Hey.” It seemed a good place to start.

“Hey,” she answered, not looking up from her doodle.

“You’re Nicole.” It was obvious that losing his virginity the previous summer had not opened up some portal to the Land of Suave.

“So they tell me.”

“I’m Fox. Fox Mulder,” he continued, undaunted.

“I’m very sorry for you.” He could detect a trace of a grin at the corner of her pearly pink lips.

“Well, that makes two of us.”

She finally looked up at him with a hint of interest. He was making progress. Now he just had to figure out why.

“And what’s your story, Fox Mulder? Are you the virgin-deflowering quarterback? The nerd who gets a woody from watching Wonderwoman? Or something else entirely?”

He was taken aback by her frankness, but tried hard not to show it.

“Something else entirely, I suppose, given those options. I’m on the basketball team, but I’m no jock. I get decent grades, but I’m not a virgin. I’m just plotting my escape from this Stepford hell, I guess.”

She appraised him anew, her eyes taking in the developing bulk of his shoulders, the fine chestnut hair covering his forearms, and the pronounced knob of his Adam’s apple as it rose and descended his throat like an elevator.

She extended a small, pale hand tipped with rainbow-coloured nails and he shook it with well-bred fluidity.

“Pleased to meet you, Fox Mulder. What are you doing after school?”

 

As it turned out, he was doing Nicole. Her mother’s motel had eight rooms, and seven were nearly almost empty. As long as they washed the sheets afterwards and left the furniture intact, there was no shortage of horizontal surfaces on which to express their mutual attraction.

By the weekend, he’d increased his sexual repertoire by a factor of at least five, gone from an average of ten seconds to ten minutes of actual fucking, and finally figured out what it took to make a girl come. Well, what it took to make Nicole come, which was, in truth, not much. Still, he’d developed a distinct swagger as he strutted the halls of MVHS. Just barely fifteen, and a certified sex god.

The only fly in his ointment was her reluctance to be seen together at school. They sat side by side on the bus each morning, but parted company at the gates. He tried not to mind. He didn’t want to be That Guy. But he was banging, in his estimation, the prettiest girl in school, and dammit he wanted the world to know it!

Curled around her tiny frame, sticky and humming like a high voltage wire after a particularly vigorous round of headboard shunting, he brought up the topic in his usual delicate fashion.

“How come you won’t let me hold your hand at school?”

She groaned, and not in a good way.

“What for? You wanna show off for your white bread friends? Pin a corsage on me and take me to prom?” For once, he didn’t find her sarcasm charming.

“Yeah. As a matter of fact, I do. You’re my girlfriend. Why shouldn’t I want those things?”

A strangled hoot erupted from Nicole.

“Your girlfriend?! Is that what you think is happening here?”

A caustic burn roiled in his gut. How did things go from so good to so bad so quickly? Why hadn’t he kept his bloody mouth shut?

“Nicole, listen. I… I think I love you, and…”

She stopped him with a palm over his mouth.

“Stop right there, Fox Mulder. This thing you want to call love, it’s just lust.” To emphasize her point, she reached between them and grabbed his limp dick in her other tiny hand. “It’s hormones. Chemicals. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good time, and I enjoy fucking you, but let’s not dress it up and call it something pretty, when it could be gone tomorrow.”

He hated what she was saying, and he hated it even more because he knew she was right. In truth, he barely knew her beyond the animal understanding he’d derived from her body.

He pushed her hand down towards his balls, which were again drawing up tight in answer to his tireless adolescent libido.

“Well, if that’s all we’re doing, then you better turn around and get on your knees,” he growled, thrilling as her pupils dilated into dark ponds of passion.

He was Bill Mulder’s son, after all. What could you expect?


	3. Aviva

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: under-aged sex.

His relationship with Nicole, such as it was, petered off. Oddly enough, they became good friends, so when she showed up at his front door on a dismal May night, he wasn’t immediately alarmed. She was pale and shaking, a rain-soaked pixie on his mother’s sun porch.

She was pregnant, and needed him to drive her to Boston for an abortion.

“It’s not yours,” she explained needlessly. It had been at least three months since their last trip down memory lane on the polyester bedspreads of the Totem Pole Inn.

“I know. Grab a towel from the laundry room and dry off. I’ll get Mom’s keys.”

“Won’t she be mad?” She sounded smaller somehow, like the new spark inside of her had diminished her own.

“Don’t worry about it.”

She had, in fact, been very mad. Someone must have spotted them on the Wood’s Hole ferry, and the Lincoln Continental missing from the driveway the next morning was a sure clue. But sneaking off the island in a stolen car without a license wasn’t his true crime. His mother’s moral compass was subtler than that.

“What have you done, Fox? Messing around with that shiksa. For shame. Did you get her in trouble?”

He bore her wrath and the subsequent punishment (no car for his sixteenth birthday) with granite stoicism. He should have known she wasn’t finished meting out her form of social justice.

Summer came with the liberating promise of twelve weeks spent with no responsibilities at all. Next year he’d be off to university, so he thought of that summer between Junior and Senior year as his last gasp of youthful freedom, and he intended to make the most of it.

The guys had all bought used long boards and they loaded them into Matt’s station wagon and drove the sandy path to Squibnocket Beach each morning. He came home after dark each night with languorously taxed limbs and skin darkened to the colour of teak. His bed rolled and heaved to the rhythm of the waves as he drifted towards the horizon of sleep.

That night, the screen porch chirped his arrival, and his mother looked up in anticipation from the sofa. Across from her sat a middle aged man with a bushy mustache and wire-rimmed glasses and a dark-haired girl about his age.

“Oh good, Fox. I’d like you to meet Harold Bloom and his daughter, Aviva. Mr. Bloom is a good friend of your uncle’s.”

“How do you do, Mr. Bloom. Aviva.” He shook the man’s hand firmly, as he’d been taught, but wasn’t quite certain how to greet his daughter. She was sitting very still on his mother’s damask loveseat, examining her fingernails. She had yet to look at him. He let his hand drop.

“Go get changed into something decent, Fox. You smell like seaweed. And then I’d like you to take Aviva into town and show her around. She’ll be staying with us for a few weeks, and I want you to make her feel at home.”

The back of his neck prickled with irritation. So that’s how it was going to be. It was the upper-middle-class version of an arranged courtship, and it was really going to get in the way of his summer plans.

They walked side by side down the lamplit street, with only their footsteps for company. He was boiling inside with righteous anger, but he knew it wasn’t this quiet girl’s fault. Still, he hated to play into his mother’s hand by being agreeable.

“It’s, uh, it’s a nice night.” She had a surprisingly low voice. And he couldn’t miss the nervous stammer. So much for being an asshole.

“Yeah. We get fireflies sometimes, especially on the dunes after dusk.”

“Really? I’ve never seen them before. I guess we don’t have them in New Haven.” She looked up at him for the first time, and he noticed her chocolate brown eyes, set earnest and wide in her otherwise plain face. Whatever his mother’s agenda, it was comforting to know she hadn’t summoned the Whore of Babylon to tempt her wayward son.

“Well, we can go down there some night, if you’d like. To look for fireflies.” God, this was awkward.

“I’d, I’d like that.”

“Look, Aviva. I don’t know what they’ve told you about me, but, ummm…” he trailed off, not wanting to divulge more than needs must.

“My father didn’t tell me much of anything. Just that you were going into Senior year, but that you’re still fifteen. That you’re wicked smart. And that your sister… um, disappeared? I’m really sorry about that.”

“Thanks,” he demurred.

“Is there anything else?”

“Hmm?”

“Anything else that they should have told me about you?” She sounded scared, and he was overcome by pity. Poor girl. For all he knew, she had a boyfriend back home. No, not a boyfriend. But a hobby. Horses. She probably rode horses, or collected stamps, or something. And now she’d been sent on a mission to bring him to heel, using nothing but her average looks and cautious disposition as leverage. 

“Nothing important. Let’s grab a milkshake, and tomorrow I’ll show you the beach. Have you ever surfed?”

Her laugh was the first honest thing he’d heard all evening.

***

The summer passed too quickly. Aviva came to the beach most days, but couldn’t be tempted into the water. She said she wasn’t a strong swimmer, and worried about an undertow. Usually she sat propped against some driftwood, reading a book or gazing out to sea. The guys toned down their usual ribald exuberance in her presence, and she even joined in their good-natured teasing from time to time. After the nightly bonfires died down, they walked up the moonlit road back to his mother’s house, where they quietly said goodnight and retired to their respective bedrooms.

If his mother worried for Aviva’s virtue, she gave no outward sign. He wondered if Aviva’s virtue was the bait that was dangling from the hook of propriety, and resolved even more firmly not to bite.

It wasn’t hard. Besides being shy and bookish, Aviva was the world’s least likely seductress. He caught her looking at him sometimes, as he peeled down his wetsuit, exposing his damp torso, wiry and dark as a horse chestnut, with the slightest tuft of hair between his nipples. But when she met his curious gaze she blushed and looked away. It was flattering to be the object, rather than the subject, of an adolescent crush for a change.

Soon it was August, and Aviva was heading back to the mainland. The guys threw her a going away party, with an even larger bonfire, a pilfered case of warm beer, and a guitar serenade. With the fire turning her plain brown hair to flame and two bottles of beer loosening her smile, she was pretty. Not gorgeous. Not hot. But pretty. She caught him watching her as he strummed along to Cat’s in the Cradle, and for once she didn’t look away.

He placed his precious Martin in its case and made his way to the water, knowing she would follow. She was wearing a loose sundress covered in tiny pink roses, and the ocean breeze made it brush against his bare legs. When they were far enough away that the strains of Led Zeppelin merged with the hiss of salt on sand she turned to him and grabbed his hand.

“Fox, I wanted to say thank you. I know this can’t have been how you pictured your summer, but you never made me feel unwelcome. So… thank you.”

He ducked his head and blushed, not used to direct praise.

“It’s no problem, Aviva. I enjoyed…” She interrupted his platitude.

“No, I doubt very much that you did. You shouldn’t have had to drag me around with you like some underage spinster when you could have been meeting girls, having fun.”

“Meeting girls and having fun is what drew my mother’s wrath in the first place. And I had fun with you here,” he added quickly.

“Really?” She sounded so unaccountably pleased with this tiny nugget of approval that he kicked himself. He’d been so focused on his own misery that he’d forgotten she was an equal victim in his mother’s plot.

“Sure. Who else would listen to me rant all summer about how Isaac Asimov is the greatest science fiction writer of our time?” he teased.

“After Robert Heinlein.”

“No way, Asimo-” He was cut off by the press of her dry lips to his own. Shock opened his mouth, and her beer-tainted tongue snuck inside. For several minutes, he knew only the roar of the ocean, and her smooth warm shoulders beneath his palms.

He was panting when they broke apart.

“Aviva…”

“I know you’re not going to marry me.” He shook his head like a confused dog.

“But I want you to… have sex with me.”

Truly, he was never going to understand women. He wouldn’t have predicted this turn of events in a million years. Unless…

She must have seen the suspicion creep across his face.

“I won’t tell them, Fox. They’ll never know. This isn’t for them. This is for me.”

“Aviva, you’re a great girl, but I really think that…ummm…that is…” 

She’d pushed the straps of her dress over her shoulders, and it puddled in the sand. Beneath, she was utterly and completely naked. Where had she been hiding those full breasts? And those lush hips? And… 

She stepped into his body and he groaned, a condemned man. 

They lay in the dunes, away from prying eyes, if any should happen by. The sand cradled them as they kissed and touched each other gently. Unlike his prior experiences, there was no tornado of desire, no frantic grappling. Instead, he felt a kind of tender reverence, and the weight of answerability. She’d chosen him to be her first, and he wouldn’t let her down.

His experience taking Nicole to Boston meant that he carried a condom in his wallet at all times. He was never going to bring that sort of anguish to anyone’s door. He eased it onto his rigid cock while Aviva looked on with wide eyes that reflected the moon. Holding her gently, he pushed slowly into her body, halting and breathing and kissing until he couldn’t advance any further.

He wanted to make it good for her, to give her back some part of the gift she was offering. Once they’d found how their bodies worked together, he caressed down to her knee and pulled it back high and wide. On his next stroke, she gasped. Three strokes later, she was crying out to the moon and he let himself float away on the tide of pleasure.

They held hands as they walked back to the house, both a little awed. Before they reached the glow of the porch, she kissed him one last time.

“Thanks for showing me the fireflies, Fox.”


	4. Ines

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mulder is finally not a minor, so I took the liberty of doing a little self-insert. Sue me. ;-)

Michelle was his Grade 12 chemistry lab partner. They’d known each other since kindergarten, but something about his newfound confidence with girls must have cast him in a different light that fall. That, or it was the fifteen pounds of lean muscle he’d developed paddling a long board all summer. Either way, casual familiarity turned to coy flirtation as she tapped her pale green nails atop the lab stool next to hers and purred, “Come sit next to me, Fox.”

They were an item by October, when his father countermanded his mother’s decision and bought him a TransAm for his sixteenth birthday.

“Boys will be boys, Teena. And he owned up to his responsibilities. That slut can have a litter of brats for all I care, but none of them will be Mulders.” Another charming dinner conversation, courtesy of his divorced parents.

The TransAm gave him unfettered mobility and released him from the affliction of having to take the school bus each day (made even less appealing by the fact that Nicole had dropped out of school), but it didn’t get him into Michelle’s pants.

Patrician and blue blood to the core, Michelle was a vestal virgin in the church of Nice Girls Don’t, saving herself for marriage to someone of equal pedigree. He was a half-Jewish mutt by comparison, but his surfeit of charm and gifted fingers convinced Michelle to acquire a very technical definition of virginity.

By senior prom, he could play her like a Stradivarius, and teased her that their yearbook should list “Zen and the Art of Exquisite Fellatio” as her favourite book. 

Still, by then he had an entrance letter to Oxford University lying on his nightstand, and it was thoughts of trans-Atlantic escape and not Michelle’s coltish thighs that kept him up nights.

***

Oxford was another universe. The cultural revolution taking place across Britain had not washed up on its shores, and he donned his sub-fusc like Edwardian landed gentry every morning before proceeding to lectures across the quad. If there were students getting laid, they were doing it very discretely, no doubt in the most decorous manner imaginable. He wondered if they closed their eyes and thought of Oxford.

In all honesty, he barely noticed. His brain was so stimulated that his sex drive ran a distant second, appeased by the familiar clutch and tug of his right hand. The freezing cold college showers didn’t hurt either.

Instead of going back to the States between Hilary and Trinity term, he headed to the Algarve with a cluster of first year boys from Balliol. Something about the sun and sand and copious cheap wine turned his formerly dour flatmates into rogues, and they terrorized the seashore, laughing uproariously and chasing anything in a skirt.

They were sitting at an outdoor cafe, three empty bottles of vinho tinto decorating their table, and a passionate debate about cricket was gaining amplitude.

“No no no, mate. Even if we’d played South Africa back in ‘71, we still would have gone undefeated. Tony Grieg was a masterful bowler.”

“I don’t know, Hayes. That Springbok team was prodigiously strong.”

“Bollocks. Ask Mulder. What do you say, Mulder?”

It was a public school idiosyncrasy that everyone at Oxford referred to him by his last name. After a short period of adjustment, he found he liked it. Mulder had no history. Mulder was whoever he made him to be. No-one ever wondered what had happened to Mulder’s lost sister. 

Mulder also knew nothing about cricket.

“England all the way, lads.”

A chorus of loud cheers, and another bottle of wine was uncorked.

It was about this time that he noticed their waitress. She was conservatively dressed in a long black skirt and peasant blouse, with glossy black hair and eyes that reminded him of a startled deer. She leaned over him to collect their empty bottles, and breast met shoulder for a fleeting moment. A frisson ran down his spine.

That first night, the boys had insisted they leave the cafe and find some fresher mischief further down the beachfront. He left a good tip, and made sure to make eye contact before walking away. He wanted to believe she looked regretful at his departure, but it could have been relief. They were a loud bunch.

Two evenings later, they were back at their regular table, and she brought out their first bottle of wine, along with some petiscos. 

“Obrigado,” he murmured, trying to impress her with his rudimentary Portuguese.

“Disponha,” she demurely replied. Things were progressing. His heart did a little hiccough.

Several hours later, his friends were ready to find a bar that was showing England’s qualifying match for the 1978 World Cup.

“You know what, guys? I’m not really in the mood for peering at a tiny grey screen made even greyer by a fog of cigarette smoke. I’m gonna beg off.”

After some cursory protests, his friends walked west and he walked east towards their hostel, before doubling back to the cafe. She was wiping their table when he approached.

He held out five escudos. “Sorry, I forgot to leave you a tip. Ahh, err, preciso de gratificação?”

She blushed and then laughed. He shrugged his shoulders, puzzled.

“You just say that you need gratification,” she explained in her heavily accented English.

He blushed deeply, then erupted into laughter, which she echoed.

“Well, that may be true, but I really only wanted to leave you a tip.” He grinned his best boyish grin.

She smiled in response, and he sensed an opening.

“Mulder,” he introduced himself, extending his hand.

“Ines,” she replied, placing her delicate fingers on his palm. “Mul-dar? Is a strange name, não?”

“Well, it’s actually Fox Mulder. Fox.”

“Fucks?!!” She withdrew her hand quickly.

“No. Not fucks. Fox. Like, um, like a small wolf. Fox.”

“Ah. Raposa. Sim. But is still a strange name.” And then they both burst anew into gales of laughter.

After that hilarious introduction, he saw as much of Ines as he could. She lived outside of the town, and rode a little blue moped to work each morning, so he met her at the cafe, waking up late after the night’s revelries. He sat at a small table facing the sea, reading his textbooks for the next term and watching Ines interact with the other patrons. She had a thoughtless grace to her movements that he found captivating.

She was older than he’d assumed. Twenty-three, but still living with her parents. Unmarried, for reasons he couldn’t fathom in his innocence. If the cafe grew quiet, which it rarely did, she’d sit across from him and they’d share a plate of olives and sharp cheese and try to understand one another. After a pause in one such conversation, a cool slender foot skimmed up his right calf, tickling beneath his knee and causing his khaki shorts to tent. He looked across the table at her and she answered with a slow, sleepy blink.

They met on a Tuesday. By Saturday, he didn’t know who was seducing whom.

His friends gave up on him, rolling their eyes and teasing him for “going native”, but he could read the envy in their faces as he came back to their shared hostel room later and later each night.

Portugal was a conservative country, and Ines had to live in this small, gossip-fueled town long after he was gone. They kissed in narrow alleyways. They necked behind the breakwater. When she had a rare day off, they walked hand in hand down dusty farm roads until they found an ancient oak tree and lay down in its shade.

His hands charted the exotic territory of her thighs, ass, pelvic mound, before slipping inside her underwear and teasing the moist envelope of her labia.

“Sim, Mul-dar. É tão bom. Sim. Sim.” The sound of his surname on her pretty wine-dark lips was the most beautiful song he knew.

Their last night arrived, and he watched her patiently as the cafe emptied, memorizing her for a rainy day. Finally, her work was done, and she approached his table and held out her hand. She led him through dark tangled streets, past barred windows and open doors. At the base of a steep external stairway, she lifted her finger to his lips, requesting silence. They climbed, and behind the slanted door was an austere room. A mattress, a rustic armoire, and a wooden chair were the only furnishings, but the gauzy curtains billowed before an open window that faced the sea breeze.

“Is Martim’s room. The chef. He sleep with friend tonight.”

He understood at once what she’d done, and why, and he was humbled by her courage.

“Ines, I… this is wonderful. But it’s not necessary. Você não precisa fazer.”

She covered his lips with her finger once more, then ran her fingers over his crotch lightly.

“Precisa de gratificação,” she repeated his first words to her. 

“I’m fine, Ines. You don’t need to-” She kissed him silent before whispering in his ear.

“Not you, Mul-dar. Me.”


	5. Phoebe

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is where things get dark and non-consensual. If graphic portrayals of kinky, unhealthy sex are not your thing, feel free to skip this one. All you need to know is what Mulder tells us in Fire: he got in above his head.

After seven hundred and sixteen years of being a male dominion, 1979 marked the year Balliol College admitted its first female students. If the Masters could have anticipated Phoebe Green, they might have reconsidered.

His first year at Oxford had been revelatory. Exceptionalism was a competitive sport amongst his peers, and social peculiarity a mark of fine breeding. Unburdened of his past and intubating information at a ferocious rate, he felt the esteem of his classmates and tutors settle on him like a mantle. He ascended on the wings of his potential, and would have been insufferable, were it not for his self-deprecating wit and native New England restraint.

Phoebe sat in his second year Abnormal Psychology lecture. She was striking, with her agate eyes and willowy figure, but it was her intellect that caught his attention. More than any woman he’d ever met, she thrived in dissent, and his position as the anointed prodigy drew her focus like a target. Her arguments were unique, meticulous, and her voice cut like glass as she delivered each parry and riposte . He found himself laying awake at night, revisiting every word and how he might best her in their next skirmish. These mental scrimmages made him hard as the oak table that served as their battleground.

He was poring over back issues of the Journal of Clinical Psychology when she settled into the chair across from his. He was immediately annoyed. The Bodleian Library was virtually empty on a Saturday evening. There was no need for them to share a reading table.

“Good evening, Mr. Mulder,” she intoned in her smooth, dismissive way. That grated on his nerves as well.

“Good evening, Miss Green.” He returned to the article he had been reading, concentration broken. After a few minutes of trying to will her into invisibility, he sighed and began to collect his things.

“Leaving so soon? I hope I’ve not disturbed you.” Her delivery made it clear she hoped nothing of the kind.

“Not at all. It’s late. I have somewhere else to be,” he added with false decorum.

He rose, intending to continue his studies in his dorm. He seldom slept before three a.m., and his flatmates were both gone home this weekend. To his increasing irritation, she stood and followed him towards the quad.

“Is there something I can do for you, Miss Green?” he asked, wheeling towards her.

“Perhaps.” She let her eyes linger on him, her gaze turning leonine.

“Not interested,” he said decisively, guessing her game.

“Yes, I’ve heard that about you. That you’re not predisposed towards the pleasures of the flesh.”

He chuckled to hide his consternation. Is that what they were saying about him?

“I can assure you that’s far from the truth.”

“Excellent to hear, as I have my heart set on fucking you.” She said this as though delivering her thoughts on the weather. The tops of his ears burned.

“That’s… an interesting notion. What makes you think I’d be amenable?” Even as he coolly rebuffed her, he felt himself stirring, warm blood pumping his desire to vanquish this adversary throughout his body, but especially to his groin.

“Because you want to test the hypothesis that rivals make the best lovers,” she responded, and he knew she had won. Again.

***

She’d lain naked on his narrow bed, passive but not shy, and he’d suffered a spell of performance anxiety. Unlike his previous lovers, she seemed to expect him to intuit what she enjoyed, without guidance or vocal cues. Were it not for her marbled nipples and copious wetness, he might have thought she wasn’t aroused at all.

She pushed his shoulders to the pillows and walked her knees up his torso, lowering her pussy to his mouth.

“Make me come.”

He’d certainly given it his best effort. His taste buds were numb and his face sticky from cheekbones to chin by the time she rose with lithe grace and donned her clothing. His balls ached with delayed orgasm.

“I suppose I’ll be seeing you in lecture Monday, Fox,” were her only parting words.

***

If he thought their quasi-intimacy would soften her behaviour in class, he was mistaken. If anything, her disdain was even more caustic, her words twice as trenchant. He had to stay behind when the lecture ended, pretending to organize his notes, as his cock was so stiff he couldn't stand. He hated her, in that moment.

She found him in the library again. Not even bothering to sit down, she whispered in his ear, “Meet me in the ladies.”

His dress shoes echoed on the worn stone floors and he threw the restroom door open, not caring who else he might find inside.

“Look, Phoebe-”

“You were such a good boy the other night, Fox,” she cooed, wrapping her hand around the belly of his wool sweater and pulling him towards a stall. “Let me thank you properly.”

She proceeded to give him a blow job so amazing he’d never even fantasized about its existence. The pale ovals of her nails glossed over his balls and pressed against his anus as his bellow echoed in the ancient room, oblivious to its many ghosts.

***

“But don’t you think that in order to understand the criminal animal, we have to look out through their eyes? That is the mark of a truly gifted psychoanalyst.”

They were sitting in a local pub, drinking Guinness and engaging in their particular brand of foreplay.

“I think that it’s profoundly human to justify deviant behaviour in the name of some self-serving cause. But sheep don’t become wolves to better protect themselves.”

“God, you make me so hot,” she moaned, placing her hand high up on his thigh. “You’re all the justification for deviant behaviour one needs.”

He fucked her in the alley behind the pub that night. A misty rain made the brick wall slick beneath one palm as he pistoned into her body, two fingers fish-hooking her aristocratic mouth.

***

Summer came and he brought up the idea of remaining in Oxford, rather than going to Connecticut for ten weeks. Phoebe would be staying, having secured a position assisting a graduate research project.

“Oh, don’t bother yourself, love. I’m certain I’ll be so busy, we’d hardly have time to see each other. And Oxford is so dreary in the summertime, when everyone is gone. You should visit your mother. With only one remaining child, she must miss you terribly.”

He wasn’t certain why he’d confided the story of his missing sister to Phoebe, but it made him oddly nervous. As though she were walking around with some fragile part of him inside of her. Still, he couldn’t very well demand the knowledge back.

“I’ll miss you,” he said rashly. It was true, but Phoebe found emotions bourgeois. Besides their completely uninhibited sex life, he enjoyed matching wits with an intellectual equal on a regular basis. He had half-formed ideas of them moving to London, once their schooling was done. Setting up a practice together and fucking on the desks when work was slow. 

Phoebe looked pained, and he vowed never to bring it up again.

***

He was back in late September, relieved to flee his mother’s quiet disappointments and his father’s loud absence. He’d elected to complete his Bachelor’s in three years, so he had a full course load and regular sessions with his thesis adviser. Phoebe was nowhere to be found, and he felt surprised relief. No matter her charms, she took up a lot of space in his mental filing cabinet.

He returned to his private third year room after class one day to find her stretched across his bed wearing a leather bustier.

“Hello, Fox. How were the Colonies?”

“Phoebe. How did you get in here?”

“I sucked the porter’s cock,” she deadpanned.

He must have looked horrified, for she burst out laughing.

“Oh, Fox, you’re so gullible. I simply stole the spare key while he wasn’t looking. I wanted to surprise you.”

“I’m surprised all right. I wasn’t certain I’d be seeing you.”

“Oh, you’ll be seeing plenty of me,” she purred, raising onto all fours and exposing her bare pussy.

“Phoebe, I don’t know that this is-”

“I want you to fuck me in the ass. I’ve been thinking of it all summer. Your gorgeous cock in my ass.”

He made a gurgling noise, shaking his head as though trying to dislodge a pest.

“But first, I want you to smack it with this.” She lifted a short leather riding crop from the bed covers. He started to feel dizzy.

“Phoebe,” he protested, “I can’t hurt you. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Oh, Fox, you don’t have to want to hurt me. You simply have to do as I ask. I know you. I know you’ll enjoy it.”

Two hours later, Phoebe had left and he stumbled into the water closet. His stomach ached, whether from the strength of his orgasms or his need to vomit, he wasn’t certain. He stared at his reflection, trying to breathe deeply through his nose. A stranger looked back.

***

He managed to avoid her for several weeks. He poured himself into his studies to the point that his adviser suggested he take a weekend off. He took the train to London and walked its grey, lonely streets. He realized he’d lost his desire to live there once his degree was complete. Finding a payphone, he placed a collect call to an unfamiliar number.

“Will you accept an overseas call from Fox Mulder?” He heard his father’s consternation turn to concern in the empty seconds that followed.

“Yes, of course.” The line clicked through. “Fox? Fox, what’s the matter? Is everything alright?”

“Everything is fine, Dad. I’m just calling for my birthday,” he added sardonically, knowing it never would have occurred to his father to call.

“Happy birthday, son. Nineteen. How does it feel?”

“Umm, alright, I guess. Strange. It’s hard to believe I’ll be graduating next summer.”

“A Bachelor’s in Psychology. I’m very proud, Fox.”

He swallowed a salty knot in his throat, trying not to think about the red welts he’d left across Phoebe’s flawlessly white ass. He wondered how proud his father would be if he knew just how deviant his son had become.

“Thank you, sir,” he managed, regretting this call already.

“What do you think you might do? With a degree from Oxford and my connections, the world is your oyster.”

“Would you know anyone in the Behavioural Sciences area of the FBI?” The idea came, fully formed, into his mind as he spoke it. If he had such a facility for deviance, at least he could put it to good use.

“A profiler? Sure, I have a few connections down at Hoover. Bill Patterson and I belong to the same golf club. Let me make some inquiries.”

“Thank you, sir. Look, this must be costing you a fortune. I’ll let you go. Please give my best to Mom, and tell her I’ll call for Hanukkah.”

His father made a dismissive noise. “Very well, Fox. Take care of yourself.”

“Thank you, Dad. I lov-” There was a click as the overseas line disconnected.

***

His days followed a monotonous routine. He woke, showered, donned his sub-fusc and attended his lectures. Lunch and dinner were taken in the college dining hall, where his classmates planned their outings. Most were in four year programs and significantly less motivated than he to walk with first class honours. He spent evenings in the Bod, or going for late-night runs as the icy rain prickled his skin. If his head was full of words, or his lungs full of burning cold air, he couldn’t feel the strange vacancy in his heart.

For relief, he drank with his classmates, and it was during one such drunken pub crawl that he ran into Phoebe at The Turf, one of the bars frequented by post-graduates. She was sitting on the lap of the supervisor of her summer research project, and had the good grace to look mildly ashamed when she saw him make the connection.

“Fox!” she greeted, standing up unsteadily.

“Phoebe,” he bent to kiss her cheek. “Good to see you getting a head start on your graduate work.”

She drew back, and for a moment he thought she would slap him, but instead she burst into a hearty laugh.

“You really are too clever for your own good, Fox.”

“So it would seem.”

“Sit. Let’s have a drink, for old time’s sake.”

One drink became four, and Phoebe’s hand found its way under the table and behind his fly, where she stroked him with languid familiarity. The alcohol fueled his lust for her body and for revenge in equal measure. Before he knew it, they were the only two left at their table, and her tongue was painting the helix of his left ear. He zipped his pants with difficulty and lurched to his feet, pulling her up behind him.

“I’m going to fuck you until you don’t know your own name,” he growled, the room whirlpooling around him.

She giggled. “I’ve got a better idea.”

***

He was in a strange room, naked, his wrists tied to a burnished brass headboard, the end of a cotton scarf stuffed into his mouth. She was licking the walls of his abdomen, making his cock dance like a landed fish.

“Does this turn you on, Fox? Being at my mercy? Having to go along with anything I plan?”

He moaned through the gag, thrusting upwards into empty air.

“Yes, I thought it might. There was always something a little pathetic about your need for validation. Were you always the golden child, Fox? The best at school. The best at sports. Mother’s little darling. The apple of your father’s eye. No wonder your sister went away. No wonder you’re always trying so hard to be enough.”

He shook his head so that his ears rang, speaking indistinctly. Phoebe left him there, strapped to the bed; drunk, broken and erect. It was a relief to be alone. He might have passed out, because the next thing he saw was Phoebe, bent over the end of the bed, her hair brushing his shins. Behind her stood a strange man, still dressed in street clothes, but thrusting into Phoebe so hard the entire bed was moving.

She opened her mouth, eyes rolling upwards in ecstasy. The bed rocked in a familiar, nauseating rhythm, but he didn’t look away. He couldn’t look away. She was beautiful, her lovely tits swinging back and forth, the familiar smell of her excitement. The man started to grunt, nearing his climax, and Phoebe opened her eyes and stared at him.

“Samantha!” He couldn’t understand who’d yelled it at first. Was it Phoebe? Him? But then he saw the stranger’s mouth form the familiar syllables as he came inside his ex-lover, just as his own cock erupted, spilling cum along his hip and down onto the coarse blanket below. Tears leaked from the corners of his eyes and he struggled not to vomit behind the gag.

Phoebe’s eyes were triumphant. She’d won. Again.


	6. Elizabeth

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> While Mulder is now legally of age, there is a definite age gap described in this chapter.  
> Also, timelines in the X-Files are problematic. Sometimes it's best not to count the years too closely.

Domini, ego admitto vos ad Gradum Baccalaurei in Artibus; insuper auctoritate mea et totius Universitatis, do vobis potestatem legendi, et reliqua omnia faciendi, quae ad eundem Gradum spectant.

With those words intoned in a dead language, swearing fealty to a counterfeit god, Fox Mulder graduated with first class honours from Oxford University. As a lapsed Jewish sham, he thought he was giving Jesus Christ a run for his money. 

He was nineteen, had an offer to join FBI Academy training at Quantico in eight weeks’ time, and his most meaningful relationship was with his microwave oven. The idea that he should be entrusted with both a firearm and the delicate excavation of the criminal mind was laughable. He enrolled for his doctorate instead. 

***

As the deadline to submit his dissertation topic approached, he flipped listlessly through academic journals and recently published graduate papers. He was better suited as a patient, not a practitioner, of clinical psychology. Looking for a distraction, so that inspiration could sneak up on him unaware, he wandered to the compact but well-loved science fiction section, and paced the stacks, dragging his fingers over the knobby, dusty spines.

Of Monsters and Men. The title leaped out at him. It had been published during the 1950s, and had quaint lithographs of various mythical beasts before each chapter. He sat down at a nearby desk and began to read, hindbrain whirring. Two hours later, he had a dissertation topic and a fresh interpretation of demonic possession.

***

Dr. Williams, his doctoral supervisor, was a reluctant advocate.

“Mr. Mulder, you have a near encyclopedic understanding of the various aspects of psychotherapy, cognitive research, diagnostic techniques. And your ability to apply that knowledge to actual cases is, well, it’s eerie. Especially for one so young. I’m having difficulty supporting your desire to devote three years of research to, what? Wee beasties? Things that go bump in the night?”

So it went for the first several meetings. Finally, in exasperation he pulled three clinical assessments from recent criminal trials and highlighted the salient parts, presenting them to his advisor.

“These men were found criminally insane, Mr. Mulder. Why delve into the details of their lunacy? Their phantasms and manifestations aren’t real.”

“No more real than a psycho-sexual desire to return to the womb, but we consider an Oedipus Complex a valid and treatable psychosis.”

Dr. Williams sighed and reached for his fountain pen, resigned to another three years of losing arcane debates with Fox Mulder.

***

Filling the hours when he wasn’t studying took some effort. He ran. Took up squash because no-one could play basketball worth a damn. Drank beer with the small handful of fellow graduate students he could tolerate. Occasionally a pretty girl would show interest, and he felt something like desire stir in him, only to be quenched in a flood of self-loathing. He bought a VCR and found a XXX video store, far from campus. The videos that saw the most use were the ones he hid deepest in the drawer.

On a dreary Thursday evening, he attended a lecture offered by a visiting American professor whose title had caught his eye: Sexual Dysfunction in the U.S. Prisoner Population. The lecture hall was barely a quarter full, but he sat near the back, leaning against the polished wooden wall.

The lecturer, a Dr. Elizabeth D’Agostino from the Behavioural Psychology department at UCLA, introduced herself and launched briskly into her talk. He found her American accent and informality soothing, like tasting a favourite childhood meal. Despite her relative youth - he placed her somewhere around thirty - she was a confidant speaker whose research was both unusual and relevant. In analyzing the prevalence of various kinds of sexual dysfunction in prisoners, she made a correlation between pre-existing sexual trauma and a likelihood to commit certain crimes. 

If the FBI thing didn’t work, it sounded like he had a brilliant career as a voyeur or perhaps a wife batterer in front of him.

He was gathering his jacket after the lecture when a particular question caught his attention.

“Did you visit any women’s penitentiaries during your research, or was it solely focused on the male prisoner population?”

Dr. D’Agostino leaned an elbow on her lectern, tucking her curly blond hair behind an ear, and looked towards her interlocutor.

“Well, women are hardly ever sexual predators, so I didn’t go looking for what I knew I wouldn’t find,” she answered.

“Would you care to cite the source for that statistic?” He was speaking before he knew it.

She peered into the gloom at the back of the lecture hall, trying to make out the source of the question. Failing, she addressed the room generally.

“The number of women incarcerated for an act of sexual violence in the United States represents just 0.5% of the total female prisoner population. There are roughly 5,000 sex crimes committed by men for ever 1 sex crime committed by a woman.”

“That simply indicates that female sexual predators, to the extent that they exist, aren’t being reported or tried,” he rebutted, starting to move down the stairs towards the lectern, his still-damp jacket hanging from his left hand.

“True. But I cannot analyze an absence of data. I don’t doubt that men are hesitant to report a crime by a female sexual predator, but I also know that psycho-sexual dysfunction is considered rare in women.” By now he was standing at the base of the steps and a group of bystanders crowded around, recognizing him and anticipating a good show.

“What about the weaponization of sex by women?”

“The weaponization…”

“As the recipients of sexual violence by men, and with limited avenues for aggressive sexual expression, women might utilize casual sex as a means of acting out, as retribution. A psychological warfare of the bedroom, if you will.”

Dr. D’Agostino observed him for a moment, clearly taken aback by this line of inquiry, but giving it serious consideration.

“That’s… that’s an angle I haven’t encountered in my research, Mister…?”

“Mulder.”

“Well, Mr. Mulder, I am afraid you have me at a loss. You’ve brought up a valid point, and I’d need to do some reading before I could possibly respond in the intelligent manner your question deserves.” 

“That’s alright. I already know what you’ll find, and that is precisely nothing. As you say, in the absence of empirical data, a thing might as well not exist.” And then, donning his jacket and ignoring the ten other students who stood watching their exchange like a tennis match, he said, “Thank you. I enjoyed your lecture,” and left the room.

***

She was married. She would be returning to Los Angeles and her husband at the end of Michaelmas term. It was unethical to become involved with a student. He was very, very young.

Elizabeth D’Agostino raised all of these defences and more, but they were inadequate against one undeniable fact: she wanted him. From the very first moment, standing in that lecture hall, with damp chestnut hair and a pensive, ageless sorrow, she wanted him.

She’d made the first move. Upon seeing him on campus several days after her lecture, she called out to him.

“Mr. Mulder!” He stopped and turned, and she was struck anew by how someone could be so beautiful and so tragic at once.

“Dr. D’Agostino. It’s nice to see you again. I’ve been thinking quite a bit about your lecture.”

“As have I, Mr. Mulder…”

“Just Mulder, please. I can’t abide this “mister” business.”

“You’re American,” she suddenly realized.

“Only if they’ll have me back,” he grinned, and she felt her heart flutter like a schoolgirl.

***

They met for coffee. She loaned him her car-let when he needed to go to Leeds to access their collection on Victorian spectral hauntings. He brought her a mimeographed copy of an interesting article about chemical castration and a cherry cheese danish. She fell in love. Hopeless, unrequited, stare-out-the-window-for-hours love.

***

“Who was she?”

He looked up from the snowdrift of papers on her coffee table, pen cap still poised between his lips. She could tell he knew immediately what she was referring to, but he took his time answering.

“Just the grain of salt in an already super-saturated solution.”

“No-one likes a chemistry nerd, Mulder.”

“No, really, Elizabeth. It doesn’t matter who she was, because she would have happened to me regardless. I was an ugly accident waiting to happen.”

“And now?”

“Now I’m just relationship road kill,” he deflected in his glib manner.

She rose from her sofa and sat on the table before him, letting her hands winnow through his soft hair for the first time. He leaned into the touch involuntarily.

“It would be a tragedy for you to give up on love so early on,” she said, heart pounding high in her throat.

“I think love is like a mirror. It can only reflect back the light you cast on it.” 

“And you think it’s too dark to see your reflection?” she whispered.

“Something like that.”

She stood, extending her hand and watching him rise like a dream beside her, eyes wary and so very very hopeful.

“Then let me be your mirror, Mulder. See your beauty in me.”


	7. Neelam, Ava and Christie (maybe?)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I lied. This chapter has 3 partners, rather than just one.

Michaelmas Term ended and Elizabeth went back to the States.  Standing on the curb, watching the cabbie load her three suitcases into the boot, he felt strangely serene; a thought bubble floating over the action sequences of his life.

Elizabeth stood below him on the roadway, hands hidden away like secrets in the deep pockets of her overcoat.

“You going to be okay, Mulder?”

He thought of the first day back to school after Samantha was gone.  Taking the ferry off the Vineyard for the last time on his way to England.  Waking up alone the morning after that last night with Phoebe and realizing he was still breathing.

“Yeah.  Yeah, I’ll be fine.  Don’t worry about me.”

“It’s…” She leaned slightly towards him and then corrected herself.  “It’s been a pleasure, Mulder.  You’re going to do great things.  Think of me, a little.”

She was crying, but hiding it well behind her halo of curls.  A door closed, and the cab drove away.  He turned into the wind and walked back to his dorm.

***

Life went on in its unflinching way.   A man named Bill Patterson called from Washington, DC to talk about his research.  Rather than scuttle his chance of employment by the FBI, his burgeoning fascination with all things paranormal only seemed to interest them more.  A job was waiting for him, when he was ready.   He wasn’t ready.

It was a glorious spring: fresh and Granny Smith green in the way only England could be.   David Bowie was playing Wembley Arena, and a motley assortment of guys piled into Neil’s pitiful Austin Allegro, boom box balanced behind the gear shift, and invaded London.   He dropped some ecstasy while Neil searched for parking.

The music was deafening, and he could barely hear Bowie over the roar of the crowd.    Limbs pressed against him from all sides, and he felt part of a living, breathing super-organism that spread like fog across the shore of the arena.  He was high as a kite, in love with the world.  Particularly in love with the black denim-clad hips of the woman in front of him, as they swayed and sashayed to China Girl, slipping a noose of pleasure around him when they made contact with his groin.  

He placed a tentative hand on her waist, almost level with his own.  She had legs for days.  Two pupil wells assessed him, ringed in darkest brown.  He wasn’t the only one flying.

“It’s about speedballing,” she yelled into his ear, but he only heard the last word.

“No thanks.  Not my scene.”

She laughed.  “Nor mine.  Can you imagine?   Nice Bengali girl snorting blow.  Mama-ji would arrest on the spot!  I was talking about the song.”

Her name was Neelam, and she was a medical student.  His name was Mulder, and he was appallingly aroused.   By the time Space Oddity came around (his favourite Bowie song), he had borrowed the keys from a confused Neil and was leading her out of the stadium.

Six feet of man and five foot ten of woman were not designed to fuck in the back seat of an Allegro, but they made it work.   Her skin was velveteen rabbit soft and her hair a coarse vine that he wanted to climb into the jungle damp inside of her.  He fumbled for his wallet, but she beat him to it, removing a condom from her tiny purse.

“Put your helmet on, Major Tom,” she purred in that exotic lilt, and his love for her in that moment burst from his chest in iridescent bubbles of light.

***

He met Ava at the King’s Arms.  She wasn’t at Oxford.  She wasn’t anywhere, really.   She seemed to be floating through life without much purpose or direction, and he vacillated between admiration and concern for her.   

On the surface they had little in common, but it worked.   She laughed at his jokes.  He coveted her extensive collection of punk LPs.   They both hated Margaret Thatcher.  And they were electric in bed.  He was grateful for her small sub-let cottage, fifty yards from the nearest prying ear, because the soundtrack of their sex life made his XXX videos sound Disney-esque.

Although it made him an asshole, the thing he liked most about Ava was how little she needed from him.  As long as he railed against the conservative oligarchy, bought his own weed, and fucked her silly when his schedule permitted, she was content.  He never mentioned that he was, in fact, a scion of the conservative oligarchy.

They took the train to Liverpool and explored the boarded up factories, picking through records at Probe.  They walked along the Cherwell, feeding stale bread to the mute swans.  But mostly, they cloistered themselves in Ava’s two-room garden cottage and listened to loud music, burning toast on the hot plate while they frolicked like satyrs.

Then, in October, she stopped answering his calls.  When the mechanical tone of an operator informed him that her number was no longer in service, he drove out to the cottage and knocked on the door.  No answer.   Looking through the grimy window, he could see that her record collection and stereo were gone.

“Aye, she hared out of here last Tuesday.   Crammed all her junk into some bloke's little MG and flew the coop.”  This from the middle-aged man in whose garden Ava’s cottage was located.

“Did she leave a forwarding address?  A phone number?”

The landlord’s bleary blue eyes observed him with pity.

“Nah, lad.   She was flighty, that one.  Yea’ll be better off without her.”

He walked back to his flat, alone.

***

The oral defence of his dissertation took place on a warm Wednesday in September.  He walked out of the honey-hued building and stood in the dappled sunlight of the quad afterward.  It was done.  No matter how esoteric his subject (”The Supernatural as Psychosis: A Re-evaluation of Criminal Intent”), he knew he had defended it admirably.  There would be an inexorable waterfall of consequences, once he was officially granted his sheepskin.  Doctor Fox William Mulder.   Jesus Fucking Christ.

His small group of friends took him out on a pub crawl to prematurely celebrate his doctorate.  They were a boisterous bunch, yelling outlandish stories over top of the music in one narrow booth after another.  He was as happy as he could remember since arriving at Oxford.

Somewhere around their fourth pub, they acquired a small following of women.  Peter’s sister’s flatmate and her friends, or something of the sort.  One in particular kept catching his eye and smiling as though she knew something tantalizing and was just waiting for the right moment to tell him.  The right moment apparently arrived at the next pub.

“You’re hot,” she stated, running a well-manicured nail up his thigh.  

It had been eleven months since Ava split, and he was willing to overlook a bad pick-up line in the name of leaving Oxford on a high note.

They ended up back in his rooms, three sheets to the wind and no sheets on the bed.  They tore into each other like beggars at a feast, and he thought things were going rather well until she rolled onto her belly, lifting her muscular ass in the air.

“Spank me.”

He wilted immediately, but she was too far gone to notice.

“Come on, Fox.  Smack me on the ass.  Tell me what a bad girl I’ve been, picking up some strange guy at a pub and fucking him.”

He thought of Phoebe’s riding crop, and the feeling of flying down a mountain in a burning car with no brakes.  He swallowed and raised his hand, letting it fall against the girl’s rump. (Chrissy?  Christie?  He was never quite sure.)  She shuddered and panted.

“Again,” she begged.

He stood behind her now, cock at half mast, and let loose with a stinging slap, a pink rose blossoming on her skin.

“Fuck, yes.  I love that.  I knew you’d know what I wanted.”

A few more slaps and he slid back into her, wet and pulsing with lust.

“Who’s my bad girl?” he grunted in her ear, and she came with a series of sharp yelps.

She’s not Phoebe, he reminded himself.  She’s not Phoebe, and you’re not a monster, Fox.  You might be able to think like one, and there’s a monster inside all of us, looking for a way to get out, but you decide.  You decide who you’re going to be each and every day for the rest of your life.

***

He was packing his things into a trunk when the porter knocked.

“A package for you, Mr. Mulder.”  He was handed a heavy brown-paper wrapped rectangle.   It was postmarked in California.

Inside was a hardcover edition of Of Monsters and Men, signed by the author, who as far as he knew was dead.  A single piece of card stock poked out from its pages.

_Dear Mulder,_

_The academic community of behavioural psychologists isn’t so big that I haven’t heard stories of your masterfully defended thesis.   Congratulations.  I’m so very proud of you._

_It’s always hot in Los Angeles, and I daydream of my rain-soaked months at Oxford and smile.  I think of you, beautiful one, and I smile still._

_The worst thing a psychologist can do to a friend is analyze them.  Try to remember that.  But I am going to break that cardinal rule, because I decided the day I met you that rules don’t apply to us._

_You wear heartache like a hair shirt. While I do not know the details, I know you think you deserve to be punished by those you love.  You’ll repeat that trauma, over and over again, until you break its cycle by finding someone who’ll stand by you as you confront your history and forgive yourself._

_She’s a lucky woman, whoever she will be._

_Forever, Elizabeth_


	8. Jade

He reported to Quantico on a foggy November morning, the sun distant and timid.  At 25, he was the youngest recruit, and the only one whose profile of a serial killer was already being circulated in the halls of the Hoover Building.  Still, he’d been told there would be no short cuts, and he wouldn’t have taken one if it had been offered.

His cohort, Class 86-15, was made up of people from all walks of life, their sole commonality their willingness to undergo the next eighteen weeks of hardship.  There were forty men and eight women, but only one Jade.

She was hard to miss, but easy to overlook.  Literally.  In their FBI-issued hiking boots, the tips of her pixie-cut black hair didn’t graze his chin.  She had a degree in electrical engineering from Stanford, three older brothers, a wicked sense of humour, and, he was soon to learn, balls of solid titanium.

In an early combat exercise, the class was divided into four groups that each stood in a broad circle.  One at a time, a recruit stepped into the ring and withstood two minutes of the hardest pummeling the other students could mete out.  

Jade volunteered to go first.  As one after another male classmate pulled his punches, she grew increasingly angry.

“Come on, you motherfuckers!  If I were a shooter I’d be laughing in my getaway car right now.  Hit me.  Come on you pussies, hit me!”

Suffice it to say that their instructors were very impressed.

On the shooting range, in the classroom, on the running track; he got the impression Jade had never not excelled at something in her life.

He was getting ready for bed one night when there was a soft knock.  His roommate was already asleep, so he quickly opened the door and joined her in the hallway.

“Hey.  Jade.  What’s up?”  They were collegial, but hardly chummy, and he couldn’t fathom what she wanted.

“I need your help, Mulder,” she launched in, looking like a Chinese street urchin in her oversized Quantico sweats.

“Sure.  Just don’t expect me to take you down again, because my butt still hasn’t recovered from the last time.”  Among her many accomplishments, it turned out Jade was a black belt in jiujitsu.

She smiled her surprisingly wide smile and shook her head.

“Nah, there’s no glory in kicking your ass a second time.”

It turned out Jade wanted him to spot her during her evening weight sessions in the gym.  She was fast.  She was tough. She was whip-crack smart.  But if she couldn’t complete 30 push-ups in a minute by the time their PT test rolled around, she was out of the Academy.

“Why me?”

“Because you’re the only one who’ll sail out of here with distinction, no matter how much time you waste listening to me cuss out a barbell.  Just don’t take it as an invitation to stare at my tits, Spooky,” she said, using his new, much-loathed moniker.

“Wouldn’t dream of it.  Besides, you don’t have tits, Chen.”

And that was how he and Jade became friends.

***

Despite regulations to the contrary, the Quantico dorm was a rabbit warren of sexual activity.  There was another female recruit, Diana Fowley, who’d made it apparent she’d welcome his attentions.   Jade teased him about it, saying it would be like fucking himself in the mirror, and he rolled his eyes dutifully, but she wasn’t far from right.

Graduation for the thirty-seven recruits who made it through the Academy happened in late March.  He’d scored top marks in his class in almost every area, but it was Jade who addressed the auditorium of gathered friends and family: the first female recruit to do so in the FBI’s history.  She was assigned to the Bureau’s new cybercrime division, based out of Washington.  He drew Washington too - a decision which had his father’s influence all over it - and would start in the Behavioural Analysis Unit of the ISU, under Bill Patterson.

***

The April rain smelled like cherry blossoms, and his feet hit the pavement with a pleasant ache.  His subconscious led him to run to her apartment, where he’d helped move in her furniture just a week before.

She was tiny and perfect, limned in the blue light of a muted television.  He stood dripping in her hallway, mute and astonished.

“What took you so long?” were her only words before he lifted her into his arms and brought his mouth to hers as though that was where it was always meant to be.  They ricocheted off walls, giggling and leaving clothes behind them like breadcrumbs leading to their happily-ever-after.

***

She made him feel protective, without needing his protection.  She lived in a world that had no time for supernatural monsters, because the human ones were all too present.  She took none of his shit, but gave him all the space he needed to grow into this newly minted version of himself.  With an evil twinkle in her dark eyes, she claimed he was larger than life: big heart, big ego, big dick. 

They moved into a walk-up in Crystal City above a Chinese restaurant, which she found hilariously ironic.  On weekends, they went for runs in Arlington Cemetery, escaped the heat of their un-air-conditioned apartment by browsing through used bookstores, argued over who hated cooking more.  They flew to Sacramento at Christmastime and he met her whole family: a Russian nesting dolls set of Jades, each more hard-working and plain-spoken than the last.  He introduced her to his mother after months of badgering on Jade’s part.  She never brought it up again.

The work took its toll, but she was his refuge.  The place he came back to to weather each storm.  She’d order a pizza, find a badly dubbed kung fu movie on cable, and run her fingers absently through his hair until he felt half-way human again.

Lying that way on their green leather couch one night, he spoke without hesitation.

“Jade?”

“Hmmm?”

“Marry me.”

A pause, but her hand never stopped stroking his hair.  “Yeah, okay.  Sounds like fun.  Just don’t expect me to wear one of those cultural rip-off red silk kimono numbers.”

***

She tolerated his fascination with the paranormal, up to a point.

“I come from the world’s most haunted civilization, Mulder.  I could go toe-to-toe with you, ghost story for ghost story.   But that’s not where we live.   We live here, in this muggy Virginia apartment.  Which, by the way, needs to be vacuumed, and the ancestral spirits show no aptitude for housework.   Get cracking, Spooky.”

His obsession with knowing what happened to his sister grew with each criminal he profiled, each photograph of a victim's body discarded like trash.  He had no grave to visit, so he dwelled in his memories.  There was something there, just out of reach, and he had to know what it was.

Jade argued against the regression hypnosis, but in the end she sat waiting in their car while Dr. Werber unlocked the darkest doors in his mind.  Pale and disoriented, clutching the video tape of his session, she had to drive him home.

He didn’t expect her to believe.  It wasn’t her disbelief that stung.  It was her unwillingness to listen.  He spent more time at work, researching the alien abduction phenomenon, wandering further and further off into darkness with each case.   

Jade was moving up quickly in CyberCrime, leading a small team of agents already.   Married for almost eighteen months, they stopped talking about buying a house.  Stopped talking about children.  Stopped talking.

It wasn’t infidelity or contempt or ambition that ended them, although all three stood in the wings, licking their hungry lips.  It was neglect.  He loved her, but he loved his all-consuming search for the truth more.   She loved him, but she could only love in a concrete, three-dimensional world that he had left behind.   One subdued conversation, some tears, and she was gone.

He didn’t take off his ring.  Not even when he was fucking another woman.  It was proof that he’d made a place for himself in that three-dimensional world for a little while.   A reminder that he’d failed at even the easiest love that could ever have been asked of him.

***

He came back to the apartment late one night, a container of mu shu pork in one hand, having just returned from investigating a case in Iowa with Diana.  Pressing play on the answering machine,  he went to grab a beer from the fridge.

“Mr. Mulder.  This is Doctor Shah at George Washington University Hospital.  We have you listed as next of kin for Ms. Jade Chen.  I’m sorry to inform you-”

***

She’d been out running, late at night, and witnessed a mugging.  Unarmed but fearless, she’d intervened.  The bullet perforated her skull, and she was dead before she hit the ground.  The mugging victim survived.

It took hours of railing to the assistant director, and then a phone call to his father, but Jade was buried with full honours as an FBI agent killed in the line of duty.  If dying in the place of a perfect stranger while assailing two men who outweighed her by a hundred pounds each wasn’t duty, then duty needed a new name.   Jade had taught him that.

Her family endowed an award for the highest scoring female agent graduating from the FBI Academy.  It's first recipient was a young medical doctor named Dana Scully.


	9. Diana

He never mentioned it to Jade, but he’d slept with Diana once while at the Academy.   Well, sleep didn’t factor into it, but they’d had sex.  Schtooped.  Gotten their jollies and then gone their separate ways.   Jade had been right.  It felt remarkably like fucking himself.   Whether that constituted narcissism or self-flagellation, he refused to contemplate.

He bumped into Diana from time to time at headquarters.  Her background practicing psychology had landed her a spot in the Bureau’s elite hostage rescue team, and he heard her name being mentioned as an ambitious ladder climber with the patronage of some very influential people.   There were intimations of how she might have used more than just her smarts to get ahead, but he discounted them.   They said the same thing about every successful female agent.

Then, 1989 happened.  His own personal  _annus horribilis_.   First, the horrifying realization that his sister had been taken by something far more inhuman than a garden-variety psychopath.   Then, on his very first case in the field, he killed Agent Steve Wallenberg.  Oh, he didn’t pull the trigger - that was John Barnett - but he still had his colleague’s blood all over his hands.   Three months later, Jade moved out, leaving three goldfish and a bottle of Jameson to witness his misery.

There was a dive bar two blocks from the apartment.   They played shitty rock music, served third rate beer, and the other patrons could very well be the same men he was chasing during his work hours.   He sat in a dim booth near the back hallway, nursed his beer until it was flat and tepid, and watched obscure sports on the tiny set mounted above the bar.   The night Diana walked in, a Pakistani test match was playing.  He remembered, because he’d been reminiscing about his early days at Oxford and marveling at how a man could become so timeworn in just a handful of years.

“Mind if I join you, Fox?”  She was dressed for work, looking as out of place as a ballerina in a coal mine.

“Diana!  Where… how did you find me here?”  He stood, good manners bred true, and she took it as an invitation to slide into the booth.  He had to bite his tongue as she ordered a Bohemian in her precise, prep-school-rounded vowels.

Ignoring his inquiry, she proceeded to pepper him with questions ostensibly related to cases she was working.  What did he think of the Stargate Project?  Had he witnessed psychokinesis firsthand?   What were his views on using a medium as a means of communicating with victims of crime?  He wasn’t so far gone that he didn’t suspect her motivations, but at that point he was so battered by the four winds of life that he hardly cared which direction his reprieve came from.

She tapped his wedding ring with a lacquered red nail at one point. 

“I heard you and Jade split.  Good riddance, if you want my opinion.”

He didn’t, but he stayed silent, feeling the pleasant sting of his betrayal swirl in his gut with the alcohol.   Fuck it, he thought.   Jade doesn’t want me, and Diana clearly does.  It felt good to be worth the effort to seduce, no matter what ulterior motives lurked behind her patrician exterior.

They fucked that night in his erstwhile marital bed, bruising and biting each other as a poor substitute for deeper feelings.  He didn’t invite her to spend the night, and she didn’t appear to care, leaving him with traces of her Amarige perfume on his sheets and a welcome sense of lethargy.  Besides, it felt good to talk to someone other than the fish.

It continued on like that for over a year.  Sometimes he wouldn’t hear from her for a few months, then they rut like stags over a sybaritic weekend.  It suited the haphazard, emotionally vacant state of his life.

***

He was seated in the BSU bullpen when she approached in an exaggerated version of her sinuous slink, perching on his desk and bending down to speak in his ear conspiratorially.

“Fox, I’ve made the most amazing discovery.   Meet me in the basement, third door past the janitor’s break room.”

Diana seemed to enjoy playing the part of a siren in some FBI-cast film noir, and he didn’t have the patience for it right then.  Children were being kidnapped and tortured, and it fell on his shoulders to pick the perpetrator out of the general population of the United States, operating on sheer intuition, a half pot of black coffee, and a nearly pathological sense of guilt.

“Not today, Diana.  I’m not… just, not today.”

“Oh, Fox, I’m so sorry!   I completely forgot you were working the Neilson kidnapping case.   How thoughtless of me.   Please, let me know if there’s anything I can do.”   And with a hand drawn across his bare forearm, she left.

He didn’t think about her visit for the next two days, as hour after desperate hour he flung his mind against an intransigent lack of empirical facts.   In the bleak latitudes of his second night without sleep, he was pacing up and down the empty hallways when he decided to go see what she’d been talking about.  Third past the janitor’s break room was a nondescript brown office door with only a flimsy handle lock.  

He was behind the door before he gave any thought to the irony of breaking and entering within the Hoover building.  Inside, the dusty room was hemmed in by standard height filing cabinets, filled (he discovered upon examining each one) with file upon file of the most outlandish, bizarre cases imaginable.  He grabbed a few at random and began to read in the weak light of a single fifty watt bulb.  

It wasn’t dereliction of duty, as he knew his subconscious was still chewing away on the Neilson case, even as his forebrain hopscotched from spiritual apparitions in Western Pennsylvania to UFO sightings in the Texas Panhandle.  Each case was diligently documented and investigated, then abandoned in a strangely deliberate way.  A strangely deliberate…  He leaped to his feet and bounded up the stairs, the breakthrough he’d been counting on materializing out of thin air, and the mysterious files forgotten for a time.

***

He spent more and more of his time in that basement room, eventually requesting a spare desk and better lighting.  During his work hours he tracked earthly monsters, and in his free time he became familiar with aberrations from beyond the realms of human understanding, for whom he felt a strange affinity.  He pulled the old file relating to Samantha's abduction and hid it amongst the cabinets, protecting it from neglect and surrounding it with other unexplained mysteries that he hoped would mark the path to some kind of conclusion.  Diana joined him when she could, and they delved into those files with more relish than they delved into each other.  The greater his interest in the files grew, the less his interest in physical intimacy with Diana became.  He had found his life’s intended destination, and she was just a temporary waypoint on the journey.  When she announced that she was transferring to Berlin for a counter-terrorism assignment, he wished her well and secretly rejoiced.  Finally, he had his files all to himself.


	10. Billie

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: some graphic depictions of the aftermath of violence.

When there is a killer on the loose, innocent civilians turn to local law enforcement to guard their safety.   When that killer turns serial, local law enforcement looks to the FBI and their team of criminal profilers to solve the mystery of human cruelty.  And when a serial killer starts to taunt the very FBI profilers who are hunting him, as the body count mounts, those FBI profilers turn to unconventional methods of investigation.

That was how he met Billie: she was an unconventional method of investigation.

He stood on the deck of the Wilson Aquatic Center, waiting for her to finish her laps.  It had been fifteen minutes, and she showed no signs of tiring.  He was impatient, but he still admired the fluid grace of her shoulders as she sliced through the water, oblivious to everything around her.  Finally, she stopped at his feet and greeted him as though she’d known he was there all along.

“You ain’t going to find him in my pool, FBI.”  Her voice spoke of pure Texas Hill Country roots, and released from her swim cap, her hair defied the weight of water in a mass of chestnut corkscrew curls.

“How’d you know what I was here for?”  He’d heard stories of her legendary perceptiveness, and was delighted, despite the circumstances, to get to experience it firsthand.

“You pick your work shoes based on how fast you can run in them.  That says cop, to me.  You stand still like you’re waiting for the rest of the world to catch up with you.  That’s the mark of a profiler.   And it’s been so long since you showered, I can smell the fear sweat on you, even over all this chlorine.  You’re a desperate man, FBI, and that’s why you’re here.”

She lifted her swim goggles and he was met by the impenetrable gaze of her liquid green eyes, foggy and sightless as glass marbles.

***

It was 1990, and audio forensics was in its infancy.   They could tape the calls made to the desk phone of Agent Fox Mulder after each new victim was located, but besides comparing the speech patterns against recordings of known killers, and running the tape through an analog filter to clean out the line noise, they were left with only the actual content of the messages, which were brief, inconsistent and psychotic.  That wasn’t particularly helpful: they already knew they were hunting a madman.

“I spy with my little eye, something that is dead.”  So went the first message.  He wasn’t even certain it came from the killer until a second message arrived on the day they found Cheryl Dubois face-down in a drainage ditch, fifty miles outside of Buffalo, where she worked as a gas station clerk.

“Listen, I’m telling you a mystery.  We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed.”  Anita Birk lay on white sheets soaked arterial red with her blood, the flayed skin of her shoulders opened like angel’s wings as greasy and opaline as the February snow outside her Ohio farmhouse window.  Why must all psychopaths be obsessed with Armageddon?

“Clever fox, get me something to eat, or I will eat thee thyself.”  It was with this last message, delivered on the day Chrissy Nivens’ dismembered body was found in a dumpster behind her favourite Toledo coffee shop that he got permission to call in Billie.  He could have asked for a pound of tea leaves, Madame Zayoga the All-Seeing, and a package of wicca sticks at that point, and someone would have handed him a requisition form.  It was Bureau lore by now that if Fox Mulder couldn’t find your killer, your killer wouldn’t be found.   And Fox Mulder was, as Billie noted, a desperate man.

***

Billie sat alone in the interview room, behind one-way glass, with only a tape of the original, uncleaned messages, and a word processor designed specifically for the blind.  She was casually dressed in medium wash jeans and a cream painter’s tee, her hair glossy and wild about her head.  He admired her poise.  They were asking her for the unthinkable, to become complicit in their failure to do their jobs.

The tape repeated on loop, and for the first few repeats, Billie did nothing.  She stared, unseeing, at the far wall and held herself in absolute stillness.  Without knowing it, those watching her through the glass did the same.  On the third or fourth pass through the half dozen messages, she began to type.   This went on for nearly an hour.  His feet ached, his eyes burned, and he couldn’t imagine how Billie was feeling, going further and further into the hell that those messages contained.

Exiting the room, she handed over twenty sheets of printed notes to him and started to leave without a word.

“Billie?  Uh, thank you.  I don’t know… anyway, thank you.”

“It’s what I was born to do, FBI.  Just like you.  Take a look through these.  You know where to find me if you want to ask me anything.”

“Yeah, sure.   Thanks again.”  She started to walk away, her white cane hovering above the smooth floor, then turned back and leaned close, so that only he could hear her.

“A word of advice, FBI?  My grandpa had a saying: don’t shit where you eat.  You should consider heeding it.”  She looked over his shoulder at where Diana stood watching on, sniffed, and then left.

***

Two days’ later he was back on the pool deck, dressed for a swim.  He waited for the lane next to Billie’s to open up, then dove in.  It had been years since he swam, and it took a few laps of awkward stroking before he caught his rhythm and disappeared.

There was something absolving about the steady thrust of his body through the firm acceptance of liquid.  Besides the obvious symbolism of purification and rebirth, he felt oddly at peace submerged in water.  Here was a place where finally he and the world could rest in equilibrium.

He was drawing hungry lungfuls of air by the time he stopped beside her, body humming and mind blissfully empty.

“You’ve got good rhythm, FBI, but your flip turn is damn ugly.”  He laughed, unsurprised that she’d known he was there.  Then he invited her for coffee.

***

“You ever find that lunatic, FBI?” They’d been meeting to swim together a few days every week, and one of the things he’d come to appreciate about Billie is how little interest she took in his job.   She’d done what she could.  The outcome of those efforts belonged to someone else.

“No, but with the details you gave us, I worked up a pretty decent profile.  It’s with the VICAP guys now to catch him.  He stopped calling me.  Which could mean that he stopped killing, but that’s unlikely, given the rate he was escalating.  Or it could mean he’s been collared for some other minor crime, and no-one’s realized they have Satan in custody.  Or it could mean his calling card ran out of minutes.   What the fuck do I know?”

“You wear all your cases so heavy around your shoulders?”

“Yeah, I guess I do.  It’s like you said - it’s what I was born to do.”

“Predestination ain’t a prison sentence, though.  I was born blind, but I never took that to mean I had to suffer for it.  I lead a well-lived life: I've got friends, interests, and my time in the water to help make sense of it all.”

“What is it about swimming that you love, Billie?”

“You mean besides the fact that I never get lost in an acre of water, and it gives me shoulders like a linebacker?  I guess it reminds me of my place in the scheme of things, and the boundaries of what I can control.”

“I don’t…”

“When I swim, I can’t see how deep the water is below me.  I could be in three feet, it could go down to the basement of the earth.  And it doesn’t matter.  My job is to stay on the surface, and that doesn’t change no matter how great the abyss below me.  It’s a good metaphor for life, dont’cha think?”

He smiled and lay his hand over hers.

“I’m glad to know you, Billie.”

“The feeling is mutual, FBI.”

***

The hollering and flashbulbs assaulted him as soon as the press conference was over.  Humboldt R. Sawyer Jr. was dead, surrounded and gunned down by FBI agents as he tried to leave the scene of his fifth and final murder.  His profile told them how to build the trap, but it took the death of one more innocent woman to end the carnage.

As he stepped off the dais he saw Billie, alone against the far wall.  Walking towards her gave him a purpose and an excuse to avoid looking anyone in the eye, as did holding her elbow as they navigated the throngs of reporters and hangers-on in the public briefing room and outside on the sidewalk.  He opened the passenger door and helped her into his car, started the engine and sat with his hands precisely at ten and two.

“You alright, FBI?”

“As well as can be expected when someone congratulates you on your role in watching five women die.”

“You got your swim stuff in the trunk?”

***

They went to a smaller, quieter pool in Bethesda, and he swam and swam until the lactic acid hurt worse than the ache inside his chest.  Billie sat with her feet dangling in the water, and he touched her briefly as he made every second turn, just acknowledging that she was there.

In her cramped second-story apartment, he raised his face to the punishing spray of her closet shower.  The door clicked open behind him and she entered on a gust of cooler air.   Her hands cupped his scapulae and her forehead rested against his spine.

He turned into the easy escape she was offering.  They read each others bodies like maps of the stars; infinity reduced to two dimensions.  She was surprisingly vocal; gasping as he drank cool water from her neck, crying out as he traced the boundaries of her ass cheeks, and groaning deep as he lifted her against the slick plastic enclosure and lost himself in her ocean depths.  After she finished quaking around him, he withdrew into the cooler dampness of the air, and she dropped to her knees, finishing him with her mouth.

They dressed quietly afterwards and he hunted for his keys.

“It wouldn't ever work between us, FBI.  Two blind people who see more than they ought.  But even the best swimmer needs a lifeline sometimes. I’m glad I could be yours.” 


	11. Mandie (866-TOP-GRLZ)

He’d been visiting his father in Washington in 1969, and the driver took them through a bad part of town. Even in daylight, the street corners and stoops were populated by women the likes of which he’d never seen before. Garnished in go-go boots, flimsy lace and kohl, he wondered aloud if they were going to a costume party.

Bill Mulder chuckled. “Those are whores, son.”

“What’s a whore?”

“A prostitute. Men pay these women to… please them.”

He’d stared then, wide-eyed, at these women who sold pleasure to the wise and powerful, like his father. Maybe this was what kept him away from home. It would certainly explain the frosty unpleasantness of his parents’ marriage.

As though guessing his thoughts, his father clarified, “Not us, son. The Mulder men don’t debase themselves by paying for sex.”

***

He thought of that long-ago conversation as he sat in the gloaming of his apartment, a telephone number on a worn scrap of paper lying on the coffee table before him. His professional duty was to uphold the law, and his personal inclination was to protect the vulnerable. AIDS was rampant in DC’s sex work industry. And if he wanted to get laid, he could wander into any bar or club of his choosing, and likely find someone willing to go home with him.

So why was he considering calling an escort service?

After Jade’s death and Diana’s departure, he’d sat himself down and performed a thorough self-analysis. His conclusion: his track record with women sucked. From the first, he’d stumbled into one relationship after another, pinballing off heartbreak and into empty sexual gratification. He’d hoped that with time, he’d meet someone who offered some tenuous foothold in the middle ground between caring too much and caring too little, but that hope withered and died with each passing year. 

His life didn’t invite stability, and he was tired of feeling guilty that he didn’t love the way the greeting card companies said he should. Love was like a mirror, he’d told Elizabeth once, and every one of his attempts at it had shown him something ugly inside himself that no-one else deserved to see.

But his body still ached to be touched. Restful sleep had always been elusive, and the mental stimulation of the X-Files often saw him still awake at dawn, researching and piecing together tenuous strings of conjecture, certain that the answer to his sister’s abduction lay hiding in the deep well of arcane mysteries into which he’d inadvertently fallen. Physical release was one of the few things that calmed his mind and allowed him to slip temporarily into oblivion.

And there was something else. Something so dark and disgusting that his thoughts sheered away from it every time it crept out from under his strict regulation. But if was going to court degradation by paying for sex, why not open that portal and find out, once and for all, where the filthy rot inside him resided? A hooker in Washington DC would be well-used to keeping those kind of secrets.

***

He waited on hold, a synthesized version of Must Have Been Love causing him to smile grimly. A musical prescription for the lovelorn. Finally a surprisingly matter-of-fact female voice picked up.

“Welcome to Top Girls, Washington DC’s premiere companionship service. My name is Elisa Covington. How may I assist you today?”

His hand shook. His heart pounded heavy in his throat. Hang up, Fox. Some things are better off not known. Just hang the fuck up.

“Hello? Is anyone there?”

His fish tank gurgled, the last of Jade’s mollies swimming aimlessly in circles under the false sun of its bulb. It was Friday evening - another sixty hours before he spoke to anyone not expecting a gratuity. Fuck it.

“Yes, hello. Sorry. I was… I’m calling about a… date.”

***

It was a surprisingly business-like transaction. He answered a series of questions about his preferences: height, build, hair colour, manner of dress. Then the service took his credit card information. Two hundred dollars for an hour, which included the cost of the hotel room and proof of a recent clean blood test. He’d be charged, whether he showed up and got off or not. He’d wear a condom, provided by the service. Saturday evening at seven, at the Marriott just south of Capitol Hill. Room 1013.

***

He wiped his sweaty palms down the front of his jeans, inhaled deeply through his nose, and knocked. The door opened into a dimly lit and innocuous hotel room and he stepped inside.

The agency had done better than he’d dare dream: she was about 5′8, slim and athletic with shoulder-length dark brown hair that fell in loose waves. Instead of the stereotypical spandex and mesh, she was dressed as he was, in jeans and a loose-fitting top. She extended her hand.

“It’s nice to meet you, Fox. My name is Mandie. Thanks for being punctual.” She had a nice voice; melodic, with no hint of a regional accent. Her hands were clean and unadorned. A perfect blank canvas on which to paint one’s desires.

“Well, it’s my dime, whether I’m here or not, right? And please call me Mulder.”

She laughed lightly and sat casually on the dark green loveseat that faced out the window towards the glowing lights of the Capitol building. He glanced at the bed, then joined her, keeping a prim distance between them.

“I gather this is your first time with my agency. I like to start with a few questions, if that’s alright. But first, can I get you something to drink?”

It was his turn to laugh.

“What’s so funny?”

“I feel like I’m here to buy life insurance, not to…” he tapered off, not wanting to be vulgar.

“Not to fuck me? Well, in either situation, you’re my customer, and your satisfaction is based on how well I give you what you need. Which may not be the same thing as what you think you want, by the way.”

“That’s a pretty progressive approach, Mandie, but I see your point. So, what would you like to know?” He found himself relaxing a bit, shoulders sinking back into the upholstery.

“Tell me a bit about your previous lovers. What experiences have you enjoyed, and what hasn’t worked for you?”

“So I’m paying two hundred dollars an hour to talk to you about my past and my sexual hang-ups? Some of the best therapists in town don’t bill that high.”

“I hate to break it to you, Mulder, but no-one hires an escort to fuck her for sixty minutes straight. Given how tightly you’re wound, I give you ten minutes, tops. So either we talk beforehand, or we talk afterwards. But if we talk beforehand, I can try to make them the best ten minutes of your week. Think of it as fucking with a side of therapy.”

He shook his head, bemused. “Fair enough.”

He didn’t feel comfortable spilling his guts or naming names, but he closed his eyes, remembering aloud some of his past encounters: the thrill of discovery with Nicole, in another hotel room, a million miles away; the unbridled kinky sex with Ava in a damp English garden; the unexpected discovery that he liked it when Diana praised his efforts. 

As he spoke, his cock tingled and hardened, pressing against the seam of his jeans. A warm hand that wasn’t his own covered its prominent ridge, rubbing languidly as moist breath painted his neck. He opened his eyes to Mandie’s hazel irises, so like his own.

“Enough talking?” he asked hoarsely, as she started to unpop the buttons of his fly.

“Yes, I think I have enough information to work with. Now stand up.”

He obliged, feeling light-headed as she knelt and slid his pants down to his ankles. Free of his clothing, he was stepping towards the bed when she halted him with a hand over his bare hip.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“Bed’s over there.”

“You don’t want me to fuck you on that bed. Beds are for comfort and permanence. For those who've earned their rest. You want me to fuck you right here, on this couch. This might be your first time paying for it, but for you, sex has always been a transaction, and you’ve never felt like you could afford to pay the price. Put on that condom - I’m about to show you just how good it can be when your debt is cleared.”

And that was how, on an otherwise normal Saturday night in 1992, Fox Mulder spent his first two hundred dollars on therapy, with a side of ejaculation.

***

“You’re distracted tonight,” Mandie observed. He was leaning against the cheap veneer of another hotel headboard. His cock extended half-erect from the fly of his underwear and she was absently painting filigree patterns on its loose sheath with her tongue.

“Yeah. I just flew back from Iowa today, and I guess my mind is still on the case.”

“You seem to travel a lot for work. It must get lonely, always being the stranger from out of town.”

“I’ve actually got a partner now. So she and I are lonely strangers together.”

“She, huh? Have you two ever….?” she looked up at him with a cheeky smile.

He laughed at the thought. “No. No way. That would be disastrous. Don’t shit where you eat, a friend once told me. And she’s way too…” he stalled, trying to think of the right word to describe what kept Scully on one side of an impenetrable wall, and his fucked up sex life on the other.

“Too ugly?” Mandie guessed, before bending her head to nip and suck on his ball sack through the thin cotton of his briefs.

“No. Not ugly,” he gasped, rising to fullness under her expert touch. “Just not for me. Jesus, Mandie, that feels amazing. Keep doing that.”

***

“In recovery from being eaten alive by bugs? I’ve heard a lot of excuses for breaking a date in my day, but that’s a first.” He’d missed their last three appointments, and he was quivering with need, shaking and pulsing with want.

“It’s true. We were released just yesterday.” He was already peeling his clothes away like molted skin, breath loud in the close confines of the hotel room.

“Your partner was there too? Oh, that must have been fun.”

“Mandie, with all due respect, shut up and get naked. I need it, badly.”

The beauty of their association was that he didn’t have to think about whether he was offending her or whether she needed something from him that he wasn’t able to provide. As long as his credit card didn’t decline, he was living up to his end of their bargain.

She eyed his erection, taut against the tender skin of his abdomen. “Yes, I can see what you mean. What do you want, Mulder? Do you want to pretend I’m her?”

“Her?” For a breathless instant, he thought she meant Samantha. But he’d never mentioned his sister to Mandie, and he realized in that moment that the wires in his brain were so tangled that even the best therapy wouldn’t make a difference. He was broken. Hopelessly and fundamentally broken.

“Your partner. What’s her name?”

He shook his head, thoroughly confused and softening, despite the proximity of Mandie’s naked body.

“No, I don’t want to pretend I’m fucking my partner. But there is something you can do for me,” he said, positioning her to bend over and clutch the back of the couch, her dark hair obscuring her face.

“Anything,” she gasped as he slid into the hot crucible of her body, where he put his secrets for safe-keeping. “You know you can ask me for anything.”

“Call me Fox. Beg me. Say, Fox, I need you.”

***

“Yes, hello Mr. Mulder. This is Elisa Covington. We haven’t heard from you for some time, and understand that you may be out of the country in Puerto Rico. As I’m sure you understand, we cannot guarantee your usual appointment without a certain amount of… regularity to your visits. We’ll be closing your file. Rest assured that all your personal and credit information will remain encrypted and secure. Please do not hesitate to contact us, if we can be of service to you again in the future. Beep.”

“Mulder, it's me. I just had something incredibly strange happen. This piece of metal that they took out of Duane Barry, it has some kind of a code on it. I ran it through a scanner and some kind of a serial number came up. What the hell is this thing, Mulder? It's almost as if... it's almost as if somebody was using it to catalogue him. Mulder! I need your help! Mul-derrrrr!”


	12. Kristen

It sucked the air from his lungs.  Like stepping on a landslide, falling precipitously from the sky, the terror he felt was visceral.  Twelve hours after hearing her animal cry of panic on his machine, the adrenal cascade still coursed through his veins.  His skin prickled with cold despite the mild night air.  His hands shook as he tried to re-enter his unlit apartment.

Gone.  Another call for help unanswered.  Misplaced trust pulled weightless into the heavens.  He’d spent his adult life thinking he could bring back his sister through knowledge and force of will alone.  Scully’s disappearance made a mockery of his vanity.   Who was he to do battle against the immensity of emptiness?

After two days without sleep, his endocrine system was shutting down.  Instead of being frozen in fear, he felt the paralysis of apathy setting in.  Some auto-regulating corner of his brain knew that he was reliving his childhood trauma, knew that his symptoms were textbook PTSD, but he could not reason his reactions away.   He broke the seal of a bottle of Valium he’d been prescribed while with the BSU, popped three pills, and fell into a dreamless sleep for fourteen hours.

***

And so it went throughout the summer of 1994.   When he wasn’t medicated, he was manic; lashing out at those who sought to aid him by day, and prowling the city by night, dreaming of rending the fabric of the night sky until the universe capitulated and returned two innocents to earth.   Skinner temporarily relieved him of his duties, and more importantly of his gun.  If self-harm was his aim, he still had an embarrassment of choices, but he held that temptation at bay.   If Samantha and Scully were out there, suffering, then he would suffer too.

***

The bitter ash of the canyon fires stung his eyes, and the horizon glowed like the cauldron of hell.   Los Angeles looked like he felt inside.  And this woman, Kristen; she spoke to him as well.  There was something enticing and undeniably erotic about the way she gloried in her pain.  They shared a kinship of torment, poised between existence and oblivion, feeding off the emotions of others and walking like living ghosts through their endless days.

***

The cheap disposable razor burned like sandpaper against the tender skin of his neck.  She smelled acrid, like cinders and fear and death.  The whirlpool suck of her anguish tugged at him.  Too tired to fight it, he bent to taste what passed for living in her mouth.  Her surfaces were smooth and cold as marble, but inside she burned like a banked fire, glowing like the canyons outside.  He wanted to discover the source of that molten heat, and let it warm him, if only for a little while.

She marked him with her merciless teeth, tiny capillaries bursting like storm clouds beneath his skin.  The knife edge of will-she-or-won’t-she made his pulse pound in his groin.  Hands scrabbled for his waistband as he bent her backwards against the bare vanity wall.  Her robe parted to reveal naked skin beneath.  

 _It’s not who you are.  It doesn’t make you happy._   His own words mocked him.  Of the two of them, who was the most forsaken?  Was he trying to save her, or latching on to another drowning soul?  And was there a difference?

Panting, he extracted a condom from his wallet, but she pulled the package from his hand and tossed it into the sink.

“You don’t want that.  You want to feel how close you can get to the edge before you fall into darkness.  That’s why you’re here.  That’s why you want me.”  

Her hand curled around his cock, coaxing him inside her.  He trembled, tempted.  So very tempted.  A hummingbird wing beat in his soul, and he fell on the side of sanity.  Reached into the soapy water and extracted the foil package, rolling the rubber on quickly and then stabbing upwards with an angry thrust.  She flinched and cried out, but he didn’t stop.  

She was damaged.  He wanted someone else to hurt for a change.  The whole world was in pain - what were a few more drops of blood?  It slickened his passage as he drove into her, the slap and pant of their bodies echoing off the tiled walls the only sound for countless minutes.  The tang of iron filled his nostrils. Looking down, he could see streaks of arterial red on his latex-covered shaft.  Something base and lupine lit up inside his brain, and he drew the pale white skin of her throat between his teeth, marking her as his own.  She came, silent and tight as a snare.  He groaned into her jugular, then slipped from her clasp, ripping off the condom and finishing with his fist, adding his cum to the mixture of blood and sweat that streaked her ivory thigh as it quivered like an aspen.  She dipped her lacquered finger into the broth they’d made of life and death, and raised it to her lips.

***

His eyes were bloodshot and his clothing reeked of smoke as he stood before the oaken door of a tidy Craftsman bungalow in Santa Monica.  He pushed the doorbell and listened for approaching footsteps, wondering what he would say if her husband answered.

But it was her.  She was still compact and trim, the same light of mischief in her blue-green eyes, which were bracketed by tiny lines that spoke of clean living under the California sun.  Her blond hair had traces of grey at the temples, and he wondered, as she stared at him in disbelief, how the previous thirteen years showed on his face.  Not well, he imagined.

“Mulder?!”

“Hi, Elizabeth.  I’m sorry for-”

“My god, Mulder.  I can’t believe…  Ohmygod, come inside.  Is something wrong?  You look so… lost.”

He practically fell then, into her arms, and she had to maneuver him like an awkward piece of furniture in order to close the door.

He was leaving sooty smears over the shoulders of her crisp white blouse, so he must be crying.  It boiled up inside him, clawing like a trapped animal in his throat.  All the rage and despair and guilt poured out of him in an endless sob.

“I lost her I lost her I lost her I’m always losing her.”


	13. Interlude

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another slight prevarication. This chapter isn't about a partner. It tells the story of how Mulder goes from hot mess to possibly letting himself love Scully.

He stayed at Elizabeth’s for three days, patching his shaky foundation with comfort food, halting revelations about his state of mind, and restful oblivion in the double bed of her spare bedroom.  He dreamed he was adrift on floating wreckage, trying to navigate to some ever-changing point without a map, with only the stars for company.  

It turned out there was no need to worry about what Elizabeth’s husband thought about him turning up on their doorstep - they’d divorced ten years before.  Still, they didn’t rekindle their affair, and for that he was thankful.  This was how he explained it to her:

“People want to borrow things from me: my mind or my heart or my body, and they always hand them back to me more damaged than before.  They use me, and I feel like I’ve failed them.  How fucked up is that?”

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, looking away to hide a stricken expression.

“Wha? No.  I wasn’t talking about us, Elizabeth.  You gave me so much in return.  I was a lost kid, and you set me on my feet and reminded me that an ugly world had room for beauty in it as well.”

“That’s a pretty generous read of my motivations, Mulder.  I came onto you like a mare in heat.”

He smirked, but didn’t deny it.

“I think you need to talk with a professional.  And no, chatting with me over waffles doesn’t count,” she argued before he could interject, raising a fork in his direction.  “You’ve got years of buried trauma to excavate.  And since you’re a brilliant behaviouralist yourself, you know just where to hide the bodies.”

He swallowed a ball of fear that rose up in his throat and whispered, “What if I don’t like what I find?  Maybe sticking my head in the sand and coping is the best I can hope for.”

“I don’t think you really believe that, or you wouldn’t have come looking for me.  I don’t deny avoidance is the easier approach, but since when have you done anything the easy way?”

He grinned in acknowledgement.  If Scully came back, he bargained with himself, he’d find himself a therapist who wasn’t a call girl and give the psycho-analysis thing a try.  It couldn’t be any worse than fucking a suicidal vampire in the vain hope that he could save her and by extension every woman he’d ever failed.

***

He might have bargained with himself in bad faith, however.  Missing for over three months, it didn’t take an actuarial table to figure out that Scully wasn’t likely to be found.  But he didn’t give up on her.  His life’s work was one hopeless cause after another.  It was no time to be making exceptions.

So when Scully emerged from her coma in Northeast Georgetown Medical Center, to say that he felt a lot of conflicting emotions was an understatement.  He was thrilled she was alive; incredulous his pleas were answered; guilty for his role in defying her family’s wishes; humbled by her physical and mental fortitude; and utterly terror-stricken that he now had to follow through on his silent promise.  

The one pre-condition he set for his pursuit of mental wellness was that it had to take place in a world that contained Dana Scully.

***

Dr. Ian Turner was a good friend of Elizabeth’s who practiced out of his home in Chevy Chase.  The Gunmen ran him through every background check they could conceive of, and Elizabeth called persistently to find out if he’d made his first appointment.

“Trust me, Mulder.  Ian is exactly what you need.  He’s unflappable, quick-witted, and he’ll extract ugly truths from you like an iron gimlet.”

“That doesn’t sound like very much fun at all,” he quipped nervously.

“It’s what you need.  Make the call.”

And he did.  Two days following his release from quarantine after Mount Avalon, he parked in front of a mid-century home with well-tended gardens and tried to calm his racing heart.  A slight man in his early fifties with wire-frame glasses answered the door and extended his hand.

“You must be Fox.  I’m so glad to finally meet you.  Please come in.”

***

It wasn’t what he’d imagined.  They didn’t progress methodically through his childhood, assigning a Freudian paradigm to each of his manifold issues and perhaps indicting a family member or two along the way.  He didn’t leave each session feeling lighter, as though he’d left behind some heavy part of his past.  In fact, on the days he met with Ian, he dragged his feet and felt like he’d been beaten mentally and emotionally with pipe iron.  

He grew angrier, and even more isolated as he revisited his long line of broken or dysfunctional relationships.  He lashed out at those around him who cared enough to try to save him from his recklessness, including Scully.  But he also started to see this behaviour for what it was: years of sand bagging against future pain.  Life was easier when no-one was on his side, because then there was no-one else for him to lose.

Scully was on his side, though.  She was staunchly, steadfastly, infuriatingly on his side, even when he wasn’t.  Especially when he wasn’t.  She was his dauntless and enduring counterpart, reflecting back radiance and reason to light his darkest moments.  

Just last week, he’d pulled a gun on her and nearly shot the one person to ever stay true in his shitshow life, and she still held his hand and led him from Modell’s hospital room afterwards.  He sat in Ian’s living room and spat out the five scariest words of their eighteen month patient-therapist relationship:

“I…uh…I think I love her.”

He snuck a look at Ian’s face, hoping his pronouncement would be seen as evidence of his progress.  He was well enough to put a name to that tightrope terror that bided in his soul, every time he imagined Scully gone.

Ian didn’t look happy.

“What?  Ian, what?  I would have thought… I mean, loving somebody is a good thing, right?”

“Of course.  But… and this is where I lay those hard truths on you like you pay me to… I don’t really think you love her.  Or rather, what you describe to me when you talk about her isn't love.”

His lips flattened into an angry snarl.  How dare he?  How dare Ian question what he knew he felt?

“Stop scowling and hear me out.  Scully is your FBI partner, and from everything you’ve told me about her, she’s also a loyal and honest friend the likes of which you life has been sadly lacking.   And she’s an attractive woman, I’m guessing?”  Here Ian stopped until he acknowledged his statement with a nod.  “And you’ve no doubt flirted with her and laid on that patented charm, because that’s what you do to deflect suspicion away from the fact that sexual attraction terrifies you.  And now you confess to me, in practically the same breath, that your greatest fear is losing her and that you love her.  Come on, Fox.  Put that Oxford doctorate to good use and tell me what I’m seeing.”

He blew air through his pursed lips, jaw muscles clenching in upset.

“That she’s a surrogate,” he finally voiced, defeated.

“Very good, Fox.  A surrogate for whom, do you think?”

“For my professional colleagues, whom I’ve alienated or ignored.  For unshakable parental affection, which I never felt.   For my sister, whom I couldn’t save.”  Every sentence rang like a nail in the coffin of his fragile hopes for a normal future with someone.  Someone like Scully.

“Don’t despair, Fox.   I’m not saying that you aren’t capable of romantic love.  And maybe that love will be for Scully, who’s to say?  But your last two - I don't even dare call them romantic - relationships were with a hooker and a woman who lit herself on fire mere hours after sleeping with you - I don’t think you’re quite ready for happily ever after yet.”

He sighed.  Elizabeth was right.  Ian didn’t pull his punches.

“A word of advice, Fox?  As someone who has hundreds of hours invested in your mental well-being: until you’re absolutely certain that your feelings for Scully are real, for the love of god please don’t fuck her.”


	14. Marita

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: depictions of non-consensual sex.

He assigned his feelings for Scully a new name, since he apparently wasn’t ready to be in love with her.   Besotted impassivity.  It covered both his desires and the demands he placed upon himself.  

As far as he could tell, this arrangement suited Scully.  They were both married to their work, and so had exchanged vows in the holy church of transitivity.  They shared a union of fiery passions for truth and justice, and the parallel lonely roads of celibacy.

If he sniffed the wind and scented a crucial element in the mystery that they each uncovered piece by piece from their opposite poles, however, it was hard to channel the predatory urge into the work alone.  His blood ran feral in his veins and she was the only quarry he cared to pursue.  When he was in this mood, he avoided grasping Scully’s shapely hips, now unveiled from beneath her formerly boxy suits, by assigning himself tasks that took him into the field without her.

So it was that he found himself in an ornate Upper East Side apartment building, on the trail of a bio-toxin of possibly extra-terrestrial origin, with Alex Krycek handcuffed to the armrest of his rental car outside.   Even without the influence of sleep deprivation, adrenaline and the scent-trail of conspiracy, New York City always made him susceptible to his appetites, and he was relieved Scully was hundreds of miles away.

Marita greeted him with her usual soignee aplomb.  Despite her Latin-sounding name, she struck him as Nordic, with lichen eyes and hair like sunglow.   Clearly her carefully enunciated words were meant to disguise her background, as well as her allegiances.

But she’d helped him before, and despite his solitary reputation, it grew lonely doubting the whole world with no-one in his corner but Scully.   That was why, when Marita suggested a nightcap while they waited for his special entry visa to Russia to be faxed to her private number, he wearily lowered his defences and accepted.

The days of after-work cocktails and weekly benders were years behind him, but two fingers of scotch shouldn’t make the room pulse and whirl in kaleidoscopic comet tails.  He wanted to tell his legs to flee, but they were leaden weights held fast against the tactile clutch of Marita’s couch.  She was speaking to him, lifting the heavy stone of his head on the crook of a crone’s claw.  Words floated down to him, devoid of context or structure.

“… arrangements… time… insurance, so if you…hardship…job…”

The phone rang, echoing down an endless tunnel.  Murmuring, his name, the harsh fricatives of some Slavic language.

A bedroom.  Cool balm of cotton against the overheated expanse of his skin.  Ice cube tympani in a glass.  Glaciers in Marita’s eyes as she stripped at the foot of the bed.  Ebony corset and garters against arctic flesh.   Cold, so cold, and he was on fire.  Hot and molten inside, as he knew she would be.  Sun blind, solar flare, hot explosion of light burning his retinas.   Gasping in fear, but pumping pumping pumping his hips upward, lifting her up into the nebulous sky.  Calling out for help because even in an upside down dreamscape, he knew this was a betrayal. ScullyScullyScully…

***

He awoke, fully dressed, back on the couch.  His head felt muzzy and there was a heavy blanket of lethargy lying over his senses, a feeling he associated with orgasm.  The mantle clock read 3am, and in the next room a fax machine groaned to life.

Marita appeared, dressed in the same silken dressing gown, with her shower-damp hair combed away from her cipher’s face.  She extended a manila folder in his direction.

“They’ve finally arrived.  At least you got some rest, while you waited.”

He blinked and dragged himself upright, lost between reality and a mirage.

“Are you sure you’re alright to drive?  I could make up the bed in my spare room and…”

“No.  Thank you, but I need to be going.”

“Everything you asked for is here.  Once you’re on the ground in Krasnoyarsk, you’re on your own, however.  Be careful, Agent Mulder.  Others have already died protecting the secrets you want to reveal.”

“Then I’ll be in familiar territory.  Thank you again.”  And with that, he left.

***

Something was wrong with Scully.  Their usual easy but combative rapport had turned stilted and cruel, and he could not fathom why.  To make matters worse, he was assailed at the oddest moments by crippling guilt and dread.  He didn’t know what he’d done, but he knew his track record with the cosmic card dealer, and if he was guilty of something, retribution would be swift and lethal.

He thought the other shoe had dropped when Scully returned from Philadelphia with a tattoo and passionate bruises left by another man under her skin.   The betrayal of their silent pact coursed like alcohol through his body, a confusing, erotic provocation, but over it all lay the premonition that he had somehow earned her unfaithfulness.

“Not everything is about you, Mulder,” she dismissed, as he tried to grope through a blind maze to make sense of her behaviour.

“Yes, but it’s…”  He wanted to say “it’s my trust you’ve broken, my heart that is leaking bloody confusion all over these tile floors” but he held back, again feeling as though there was an element to the puzzle he was missing.  To get even a hazy idea of where he stood with her and why, he was going to have to tread carefully out into the heavily mined no-man's-land between them.

“Scully, I know that you’re your own person.  That you don’t need my approval to guide your actions.  I may be a self-absorbed asshole, but those are things I know.”

She looked up at him, quietly receptive to whatever he was trying to say, and he closed his eyes and searched for the courage to say the necessary words.

“But I thought… I assumed, rather, that we’d both made the same choice.  To devote ourselves to the work.  For now.  Until… well… I thought you knew.  I thought that was enough for you.”

When he opened his eyes, she was looking at him with more open animosity than ever before, and he physically recoiled as though struck.  Her voice was dripping gall as she spoke.

“I grew to admire many things about you, Mulder, as we came to know each other.  But the one quality that stood out above the rest was your complete lack of hypocrisy.  Don’t ruin everything by accusing me of behaviour you obviously have no problems condoning in yourself.”  

With that, she rose and left their office battleground, heels tapping across the space he could very well have filled with a second desk.  But it wasn’t about the desk.  It never was.  He was starting to believe it was about some transgression only Scully knew he had made.

***

If he thought karma was finished with him, however, he was sadly mistaken.  Less than a week later, he was standing in the oncology ward of Holy Cross Memorial Hospital, listening in disbelief as Scully announced that their time together would be measured in mere days or months, not the forever he’d counted on.


	15. SpookyGal42

Perhaps it was residue from his castaway Judaism, but the only kind of omnipotent creator he could call to mind fell firmly in the Old Testament, fire and brimstone camp.   Only a truly punitive deity, tossing thunderbolts from the throne of heaven, could mete out the creative and endless hardships he had endured since adolescence.  It was easier to attribute the abuse to the vagaries of fate and a really shitty run of luck.  But now either option, remote Yahweh or spiteful Lady Luck, had turned their focus from the storm-weary but perversely resilient Fox Mulder to the fresher, and frankly more impactful target of Dana Scully.  Smite Fox Mulder, and you scored only one blow.  Smite Dana Scully, and the wound was felt twice.

“You seem to talk about Dana a lot in terms of how your actions impact her.  How do you think she interprets the events that have befallen her recently?”  Ian was sitting across the room in his favourite Eames lounger, while he brooded on the couch.

“For a scientist, Scully’s not really big on causality outside of the lab.  She might say that she accepted the risk of physical danger when she decided to be an FBI agent, even though a rare and inoperable form of cancer isn’t usually what that means.   She might say that external forces are to blame for the horror of Emily’s existence, and that I’m a self-centred narcissist to view her life only in terms of my influence on it.  She might say all those things, but she doesn’t, because Scully doesn’t talk about things that can’t be measured in microns.  Not to me, anyway.”

“You make her sound like an automaton,” Ian said with some distaste.

“I think you could chip away at Scully for eons, and what you’d have left would be a pillar of unflinching duty.   She doesn’t have to trace every bad thing that’s happened to her back to me, Ian.  I do a great job of that all by myself.”

***

_UrbaneCowboy:  Does anyone here have any experience with theories of AI psychosis?_

_SpookyGal42:  You mean like Wintermute, in that Gibson novel?_

_UrbaneCowboy:  OMG, you’ve read Neuromancer?  What are you doing slumming on a message board for abnormal psychology?_

_SpookyGal42:  Looking for love in all the wrong places? *wink*_

_UrbaneCowboy:   Oh baby, we are going to be the best of friends._

***

“You don’t need me, Mulder.  You never have.  I just hold you back.”

The weary defeat in her tone, the pained tilde of her lips, it was all falling apart right before his disbelieving eyes.  He had nobly told himself that he’d release her to safer surroundings if she ever asked.  He nobly lied his ass off, but the good intentions were real, even if they were pitifully small compared to his instinctive need to keep her at his side, where he could patrol her perimeter, on guard for greater evil.  

But to have her leave believing that she’d meant nothing to him, nothing to his quest…  She was everything: the one true thing he’d ever known, the lodestar to his perilous voyage.  She may have started as a nuisance, a credential, a surrogate and a convenient scourge, but there was no doubt in his mind now that he loved her.  Loved her selfishly and unselfishly and every way a broken man can manage to love a perfectly imperfect woman.  

Loving her and acting on that love were two distinct things, however.  He chased her into his hallway, ripped open the Scully-sized sutures on his heart, and bled words all over her upturned, chiaroscuro face and onto the threadbare carpet beneath her feet.  He saw the realization bloom in her butane eyes and couldn’t look away.  Now, she knew.  She was a brilliant woman, she could hear the silent words in the pauses between his outbursts. 

"... quit with a clear conscience, you can, but you're wrong!"  _You've never been more wrong, Scully, and I deliberately laid every stone on the path to that fallacy._

"You've kept me honest."  _I only know the truth once it's passed through your hands._

"You've made me a whole person."  _The broken parts of me only make sense when I lay them next to yours._

"I owe you everything ... Scully, and you owe me nothing."  _I cherish you.  I need you.  Please don't leave me._

He leaned into her like a flower facing the sun, terrified and yet incapable of stopping.   This was going to cause more devastation than any brick of C4 could ever do.

***

Anaphylactic shock, bullet wound to the temple, two eighteen hour flights, hypothermia, CPR in the bowels of Antarctica, aliens clawing at his calves, being tossed to the ice like discarded luggage, and thousands of dollars of reparations to the McMurdo Base for the stolen Sno-Cat: he still thanked his lucky stars that bee had hitched a ride in Scully’s collar.

They’d done their courtship dance.  She had denied.  He had persisted.  She’d been endangered.  He’d been heroic.  Now the pattern called for a cooling off period of several months in which they both studiously ignored their raw feelings while treating each other with cool professionalism.  When she showed up in his Florida hotel room with wine and cheese, he knew he’d opened Pandora’s box with his impassioned hallway disclosure.  It wasn’t his turn to be heroic again, so he fled.

***

_UrbaneCowboy:  Hi, spookstress._

_SpookyGal42:  Long time no see, Johnny Lee._

_UrbaneCowboy:  Yeah, it’s been a busy… life._

_SpookyGal42:  I hear that.  And yet here we are on a Friday evening, making the scene on a message board for professionals with more letters after their name than phone numbers in their little black books._

_UrbaneCowboy:   Speak for yourself.  I’ve got game._

_SpookyGal42:  No doubt._

_UrbaneCowboy:  I do!  There are just… reasons… why I don’t go out and find a likely woman to spend a little quality time with on a rare, quiet Friday night._

_SpookyGal42:  Wife?  Girlfriend?  STD?_

_UrbaneCowboy:  God, none of the above.  I just have other priorities right now.  More’s the pity._

_SpookyGal42: … private chat?_

_UrbaneCowboy:   You mean?  Yeah.  Yeah, sure._

***

He dodged her cautious overtures until Christmas morning.  Then, sitting thigh to thigh on his sofa after participating in a hallucinatory lover’s homicide, she caught him metaphorically flat-footed.

“Mulder, I need to ask you something.  And I need you not to panic and blurt out the first inane thought that comes to mind.”  She was looking straight ahead at the delicate gold bracelet he’d given her, still laying in its velvet clamshell.

“Uhhh, okay.  I’ll just shut up and let you talk, then.”  His heart was beating faster than earlier that evening, when he thought she had shot him.

“I… I told you I wasn’t ready to give up on being a mother.   And, ummm, I’ve found a doctor, a fertility specialist, who believes that there is a chance that my ova might be viable, with some very progressive fertilization techniques.”

“Scully, that’s-”  She silenced him with a look.

“Dr. Parenti, my specialist, wants me to get started right away.  He wanted to know if I would be selecting an anonymous donor, but…”  She hesitated and looked at him expectantly, but he stayed mute, both out of horrified fascination and because he had no idea what she expected him to say.  She wanted to have a baby.  She wanted to have a baby now.

Sighing, she continued, “Mulder, I’ve given this a lot of thought, and, I don’t want an anonymous donor.  I made a list of all of the qualities that I’d want my baby’s father to have, and… well, they’re you, Mulder.  I want my baby’s father to be you.”

Silence descended upon his darkened apartment.  It had been completely unnecessary for her to ask him to bite his tongue, as it turned out.  He couldn’t have spoken if he tried.  He wasn’t certain his heart was still beating.  He wished for a ceiling fan, a dripping faucet, a cuckoo clock.  Something to break this horrible quiet.

“You don’t have to answer me now, Mulder.  In fact, I’d rather you didn’t.  Think about it over the holidays, and, ummm, let me know.”  She was blushing now, and looking around the room for her coat and purse, obviously eager to flee ground zero now that she’d dropped this reproductive bomb.

“Scully.”  It came out as a croak. He cleared his throat and tried again.  “Scully, I don’t know what to say.”  There.  That was as honest a statement as he’d ever made.

“You don’t need to say anything right now.  I know this is a lot to ask, Mulder.  And I know you’re not ready for… anything beyond this.  With me.  That’s not what I’m suggesting.  I just… think about it.  Please.  I’ve got to go now.”

She was out the door before he regained the power of speech.  That was probably for the best, because he tipped his head to stare at the ceiling and expelled the only word that sprang to mind.

“Shit.”

***

_UrbaneCowboy:  You there?_

_SpookyGal42:  Yeah, sorta.  It’s the middle of the day, so I’m at work_

_UrbaneCowboy:  And yet logged into AIM._

_SpookyGal42:  I didn’t say it was productive work.  You’ve caught me between patients._

_UrbaneCowboy:   Good.  Umm, I need a favour._

_SpookyGal42:  What kind of favour?_

_UrbaneCowboy:  You know our, er, conversations?_

_SpookyGal42:  You mean when we type naughty things to each other while pleasuring ourselves in our respective homes?_

_UrbaneCowboy:  Yeah, that.  If it isn’t too much trouble, could we… do that now?  I mean, you don’t have to… do that.  But could you do that… for me?  So that I could… do that?  Shit._

_SpookyGal42:  Now?  Aren’t you at work?_

_UrbaneCowboy:   No, I’m at a fertility clinic.  It’s a long story.  I’m panicking, and I need a little… inspiration._

_SpookyGal42:  You might actually be more fucked up than I am._

_UrbaneCowboy:   Please..._

_SpookyGal42:  Alright, here goes.   Once upon a time, there was an abnormal psychologist, and she was very horny…_

***

He wondered if he would have slept with Diana if he hadn’t been in the midst of trying to impregnate Scully in absentia.  Besides some vague someday conversations with Jade, and a permanent Trojan-shaped ring in the leather of his wallet, he hadn’t given much thought to fatherhood.   The fact that the best and most beautiful woman in the world wanted him for the job sent him into a tailspin of self-doubt, and it was tempting to numb himself by sleeping with the wrong woman, as was his wont.  But then he pictured Scully’s eyes as they sat in Dr. Parenti’s waiting room, crystalline blue and lit from within by some inextinguishable spark, and he turned Diana down flat.

***

_SpookyGal42:  There you are._

_UrbaneCowboy:  Hey.  Here am I._

_SpookyGal42:  Everything okay?_

_UrbaneCowboy:   I guess.  I’m at home, recovering from an amorous attack by a sea monster.  Plus a hurricane._

_SpookyGal42:  I’m not even going to ask._

_UrbaneCowboy:  Please don’t.  Let’s talk about you._

_SpookyGal42:  Oh, I’m pretty boring by comparison.  Counselling petty criminals and nymphomaniacs._

_UrbaneCowboy:  Ohhhh, tell me more.  Psychologist to psychologist.  It’s an area of deep professional interest._

_SpookyGal42:  You’re a pervert._

_UrbaneCowboy:   You are an astute judge of character._

_SpookyGal42:  Did you want to…_

_UrbaneCowboy:  I thought you’d never ask._

***

He tried, using both his physical proximity and playful flirting, to pull Scully into the married farce that was their undercover assignment in Arcadia.  Anything to get past the carefully neutral mask she’d been wearing ever since their stand-off over Diana.  If nothing else, this case should be taking her mind off the fertility treatments, which had so far gestated nothing more than purple bruises beneath her eyes and a hair-trigger temper.  He thought he was wearing her down with his boyish charm, but she kicked him out of her bedroom, and he ended up downstairs in the darkened living room, logging into his messaging account.

_UrbaneCowboy:  You’re still awake._

_SpookyGal42:  Yeah, I went to a bachelorette party tonight.  Just got home, and the whole room is spinning._

_UrbaneCowboy:   You need to drink some water.  Maybe eat some toast.  Soak up all that yummy alcohol._

_SpookyGal42:  That’s not what I need._

_UrbaneCowboy:  Oh no?_

_SpookyGal42:  No.  I need to get fucked._

_UrbaneCowboy:  Shit._

_SpookyGal42:  You’re not anywhere near Seattle are you?_

_UrbaneCowboy:   Afraid not.  And even if I were…_

_SpookyGal42:  Yeah.  I know.  Don’t mind me.  I’m just drunk and lonely._

_UrbaneCowboy:  And horny._

_SpookyGal42:  And horny._

_UrbaneCowboy:  We could… you know._

_SpookyGal42:  Yeah.  Yeah.  That’s an acceptable substitute.  You’re a really good virtual sex aid._

_UrbaneCowboy:   That’s what the ladies tell me._

_SpookyGal42:  Do you?  With other women?_

_UrbaneCowboy:  Ha.  No.  I’m even virtually monogamous, apparently._

_SpookyGal42:  Who is she?  The one you’re avoiding by making believe with me?_

_UrbaneCowboy:  I’m not avoiding her.  In fact, she’s asleep upstairs.  I’m just not sleeping with her._

_SpookyGal42:  Why not?_

_UrbaneCowboy:   You’d have to charge me your hourly rate and tell me where to send my cheques, if you want me to get into that.  Let’s just say that for the longest time I didn’t think we should risk everything, considering my horrible track record with women.   And I’m not sure how to prove to her that I was wrong.  That’s her area of expertise._

_SpookyGal42:  Sounds complicated._

_UrbaneCowboy:  It is.  Now where were we?_

_SpookyGal42:  When you fantasize about her, what do you imagine?_

_UrbaneCowboy:   I don’t…_

_SpookyGal42:  Of course you do.  Tell me, and then we can play pretend._

_UrbaneCowboy:  Fuck.  I don’t think I should… Dammit.  Fine.  She comes into my bedroom, after I’m asleep.  Strips off all her clothes and climbs into bed with me naked._

_SpookyGal42:  Are you naked?_

_UrbaneCowboy:   Do you mean right now?  No, but all the important parts are present and accounted for.  Christ, I’m hard already, just thinking about it._

_SpookyGal42:  Mmmm, I'm gonna make you come so hard._

A wooden squeak was his only warning, and then Scully’s voice immediately behind the sofa.

“Mulder, I was thinking about it and… what the hell are you doing on your laptop at this hour?”  Her voice rose a half octave into the range of fright or utter bewilderment.

He jumped to his feet and pulled the elastic waist of his pajama pants over his erection before turning around, but it still pushed insistently against the thin fabric, and there was no way she could miss it.

“Uh, Scully.  Hi.  I thought you’d gone to bed.”  He shifted his eyes guiltily towards the open chat window, and hers naturally followed.

_SpookyGal42:   …._

_SpookyGal42:   Are you there?  Did you finish without me?_

Scully eyebrows flew upwards, then lowered in disgust.  Her inkwell pupils volleyed between his crotch, the blinking cursor, and his face.  He felt light headed, as even more blood drained southward to fuel his racing heart.

“Scully, I can explain…”

“There’s nothing to explain, Mulder.  I’m sorry I interrupted.  Good night.”  She turned and marched with military posture back upstairs.

_SpookyGal42:   Hello?_

_UrbaneCowboy:  I’ve got to go.  Bye._

He sunk back into the over-stuffed couch and let his head fall backwards on his neck.   Shit.  Just, shit.

***

They stood beside each other in line for Starbucks during their layover at O’Hare, but there was an invisible force field around Scully that was probably showing up on the control tower’s radar.  They had spoken only to the extent absolutely necessary to wrap up the case, drive to LAX, return their rental car, and board their Chicago-bound plane.  His mind scrambled for some opening salvo, some gesture that would open the door to what was certain to be the most awkward conversation of their partnership.

“Fox?  Fox Mulder?” a deep alto inquiry from over his left shoulder.  Now what?

He and Scully both turned in the direction of the voice.  A few seconds of confusion, and then he made the connection.

“Andrea McLintock?!”  He stepped forward and gave the tall woman before him a warm hug.  Scully stared at the tile floors and tried to look inconspicuous.

“I knew it was you!  What brings you to Chicago?”

“We’re just connecting on our way to back to DC.  Oh, Andy, I’d like to introduce my partner, Dana Scully.   Scully, this is Andy.  She’s an old friend from the Vineyard.”

Scully pulled her shoulders back and shook Andy’s extended hand.   Even in her three inch heels, she looked like a china doll next to Andy’s rangy body.

“Pleased to meet you, Andy.”

After a few minutes of casual conversation, Andy said goodbye with a promise to keep in touch, and they returned to the coffee line, which had moved forward without them.

Sliding into the uncomfortable faux leather seat beside Scully at their gate, he blew carefully over his venti macchiato and then disappeared half of his cherry cheese danish in a single colossal bite.  He had skipped breakfast while he tried to devise a way back into Scully’s good graces.

“So, how did you know Andy, back on the Vineyard?”  Scully asked casually, which implied the question was the furthest possible thing from casual.  He chewed deliberately while he considered his answer.

“She was part of our street basketball crew when I was fourteen, fifteen,” he answered finally.

“She’s definitely tall enough for it.  Was she any good?”

“Yeah, she was.  So good, in fact, that she moved away in Grade 11 to go to a sports school on the mainland.  She went to Penn State on a full scholarship, but she tore her ACL during junior year, and never fully recovered.”

“So you guys kept in touch?”  Again, that false casualness, with a hint of familiar jealousy.  It was comforting to know that even when Scully wanted nothing to do with him, she didn’t want anyone else to have anything to do with him either.

“No, not really.  I heard about her through other friends, acquaintances…”

“So you two weren’t close.”

A visual whirl of memories: Andy dropping her shoulder and sending him flying to the rough pavement; her erect nipples between his sweating fingers as he dug his knees into the loose dirt for leverage; the giddy terror of walking home that night, knowing he’d stepped irrevocably into the foreign land of physical intimacy.  When he focused on Scully again, she was looking away to hide her reaction.  And he realized that he had to make her understand, even if it made her despise him.

“She was my first,” he confessed, pitching his voice low so that only she could hear him, like they did at crime scenes.

“First girlfriend?”

“No, we never dated.  First lover, I guess you’d say.  Although that paints far too romantic a picture.  It just sort of happened, the summer before I turned fifteen.  It was over before it started, literally.”  Scully’s eyebrow lifted at his disclosure, but she seemed to relax.   Apparently the ninety seconds of sexual congress he’d shared with Andy didn’t make her a threat to Scully.   He agreed with that analysis, but for very different reasons.

“Just the once?” she asked with a teasing smirk.

“Yeah, she didn’t seem too interested in a repeat performance.”

“Ouch.”

“Just the first in a long line of bitter disappointments when it comes to me and women, Scully.”

She nodded and took a sip of her dark roast.

“Scully, I need to talk to you about what you saw in Arcadia.”

“Mulder, you don’t owe me any explanations.  I was… surprised, I guess.  Embarrassed.  But just because we’re trying to create a child together doesn’t give me the right…”

“It does give you the right, Scully.  I would never have said yes to the IVF if you didn’t have that sort of claim on me.  And I want it that way.  But it doesn’t mean I don’t get… lonely.  Or frustrated.  Or…”

“Horny?” she whispered, blushing furiously now.

“Or that,” he grinned.

“I wondered.  Whether you were seeing someone discretely.  Diana, maybe.  And you were just hiding it from me because you knew how it would make me feel.”

“How would it make you feel, Scully?”  He held perfectly still, listening intently for her answer.  Nothing had ever been more important.

“Furious.  Confused.  Disappointed.  Deceived.”  Every word smaller than the last.  He reached blindly for the hand that wasn’t strangling her coffee cup and held it tightly in his own.

“I’m terrible at this, Scully.  I have failed miserably at every intimate relationship I’ve ever had.  Every single one.  Something always gets broken, and that something is usually me.  Love, to me, it's akin to the feeling that the world is coming to an end.  And I’m terrified that if I tried again, with someone who I can’t live without, that I’d never recover if it didn’t work out.”

“Maybe the answer is to ease into it.  With someone who you really trust.  Someone who knows you better than anyone.”

He couldn’t believe they were having this conversation in the departures area of Concourse B.  On a day that started out with them barely speaking.  He was gripping her hand so hard the bones must be turning to dust.

“I don’t know where to start,” he breathed.

“You could start by telling me more about Andy.  And anyone else who led you to confuse love with the apocalypse.”

“Now?” he asked.

“Now,” she answered.


	16. Dana Katherine Scully

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: a little revisiting of the non-consensual sex from a previous chapter.

The stories came to light reluctantly, unearthed like buried evidence.  He spared Scully the sordid details, but in recounting each affair he came to a startling revelation: there were things worth remembering amongst the wreckage.  Like tacking to starboard and port into a capricious wind, he’d been unknowingly heading inexorably towards the safety of shore.  Two years or even one year ago, that destination meant answers about his sister and the safety of solitude.  Now he had a different objective in mind.

In rental cars, hotel lobbies and late-nite diners, over the next few weeks he turned his romantic history over to Scully for safekeeping.  It made his belly bottom out like he was crossing a tightrope, but it was a habitual fear, not a genuine one.  Scully knew the highs and lows of every other aspect of his life, and in contravention to the laws of physics, found him greater than the sum of his broken parts.

In California again investigating an animal he believed was a Wanshang Dhole, he watched his partner bare her teeth and mark him as her territory with secret delight.  She was welcome to chase away every would-be suitor, so long as she continued to submerge him in those bottomless blue eyes and bracket his days with her fierce mind and her quiet understanding.  He had sighted the harbour lights, and was navigating towards her as quickly as the fickle sea would allow.

Scully wasn’t privy to this certainty, however, which he realized once the case was over and they were back in Washington, going over their report in her living room.

“So, you said you met Karin Berquist online?”

He was concentrating on deciphering the manic scrawl of his case notes, and didn’t pick up on her vulnerable tone.

“Yeah, on a message board relating to crypto-zoology,” he replied after a long pause.

“Then she wasn’t…”  Trailing off into mute frustration.

“Hmmm?  Wasn’t what, Scully?”  He looked up at last, and saw her staring across the room at his laptop. 

“No, Scully.  No.  She wasn’t the woman you saw me…in Arcadia… I didn’t even know her name, as pathetic as that sounds.”

She nodded and went back to pretending to read the coroner’s report of  Dr.  Detweiler’s death, but he could tell her mind was elsewhere.  She was so unencumbered by self-doubt in their professional lives that he forgot there was a different Scully in private.  One that hurt and doubted and protected her heart like every other mortal human.  He rose and moved to her side on the couch.

“Did you need to see my notes?” she asked, hands fluttering purposelessly over sheets of paper in a manila folder on her lap.

“No.  Hey, Scully.  Stop for a second, okay.”  He took her tiny hands in his own, trying to get her to look at him.

“I’m not going to chat with her anymore.  Not like that.  I already told her, as soon as we got back from Arcadia.”

“You don’t need to…” she began.

“Yeah.  Yeah, I do.  You have my undivided attention, Scully.  I need you to believe that.  My undivided attention.”

Her wet eyes met his at last and they both exhaled.  Their heads were close together, and all it would take was the slightest movement on both their parts to bring their lips together.  She kept glancing at his mouth.  He knew she wasn’t averse to the idea.  Resisting the magnetic pull she exerted, he backed away.

“But there’s still the last round of IVF to consider, and probably a lot more left for both of us to say…”

“One thing at a time,” she said quietly, and he nodded his understanding and went back to his report.

***

Scully’s attempt to bear their child ended in a wash of salt and iron just two weeks’ later.  He leaned against her brow in the cool shadows of her apartment as she grieved a wish that refused to be fulfilled.  After minutes being held to his chest and listening to him murmur as to a fretful child, she stepped back, thanked him, and asked for some time alone.  The open-ended status of their relationship made that the only choice, so he drove himself home in the rain.

Despite the soul searching her request for his participation in the IVF had precipitated, he hadn’t really thought through what his role as a prospective father meant to him personally.  Scully had needed him in a way that could potentially bind them together for eternity.  He might have questioned the wisdom of her selection, but he never doubted his dedication to the outcome.  For her.  He had wanted this pregnancy for her.  Being asked to be part of something so monumentally important to her made his head float like a mylar balloon, if he examined it too closely.

But with his shot at fatherhood vanishing along with Scully’s hopes, he considered their future together.  They had the work, but the work was theirs at the whim of the FBI.  They had a rare and peculiar friendship, but without the structure of their partnership, it felt vulnerable and without form.  A child, as selfish as he knew it made him sound, would have been the bridge that linked them forever.  There would be no child.  He still wanted some permanent connection to her.

Phillip Padgett put into words what he knew in his heart.  Agent Scully was already in love.  She loved him enough to weep in his arms, as yet more blood that was and yet was not hers stained her skin.  He knew the dimensions of his love for her when her grief hurt more than his own.  Deep down, she was a traditional woman.  He was willing to venture into unfamiliar territory to give her what she deserved: courtship.

***

Nothing soothed him quite like the slow waltz of baseball.  The acrid, loamy smell of the pitcher’s mound, the fluency of muscles swinging through, and the perfect parabolic arc of a well-struck ball.  It was oil to the choppy waters of his soul.  He lured Scully from her quiet apartment in the hopes it might ease her burdens as well.

She was warm and giddy in the fold of his body.  The crack of the bat combined with her throaty giggle aroused him, and for once he did not hide it from her, rubbing his crotch back and forth against her rump.   Finally, as the day grew old, they separated and sent the ball boy home with a generous tip.

“That was fun, Mulder.  Thank you.”  They were picking up a few stray foul balls that had dropped behind the dugout fence, and her face was a contrast of bright and dark painted by the halogen lights.  He really wanted to kiss her where the berry-stained plush of her upper lip met ivory skin.

“Not a bad attempt for a first date.”

She froze, mid-bend.  “Is that what this was?  A date?”  She sounded unsure of both her question and the answer.

“I… I want it to be.  Scully, you have to know that I…”

“I do, Mulder.  I know.  But it’s too soon after… everything.  And we still need to talk some more.”

“So, at least another two dates before you let me walk you home?”  He grinned, and was relieved when she returned it.  She’d seemed so small and sad a moment before.

“A new concept for you, huh Mulder?”

“Just another one of the crazy things you’ve talked me into, Scully.”

***

He’d been inside her mind, and it was like bathing in a glacier-fed stream.  Bracing.  Rigourous.  And so pure it was like looking through glass.

His extra-sensory abilities were fading slowly, but he could still read her thoughts as they stood under the chuppah of his doorframe and spoke vows like “constant”, like “touchstone”.

_I cannot bear to hurt you as they have.  Be patient with me, Mulder.  It’s a long walk for me to meet you where you stand._

He nodded his understanding, and she left.

***

He and Jade had watched the Big Apple drop in Times Square one year, huddled together and trying to keep their backs to the cold wind.  It had been a while, but he still knew what he should do with a beautiful woman at midnight, on the cusp of a new millennium.

Scully’s lips felt as opulent as they looked.  Like an eider down duvet on a cold day.  Like kissing a cloud.  He held himself in check, just allowing the barest introduction of conjoined breath before he pulled back and read the epistle of her upturned face.

“The world didn’t end,” he informed her, surprised at how calm he felt.  Love without a healthy side of fear or dread or shame wasn’t a language in which he was conversant.

“No, it didn’t.”

Something was wrong, but she allowed him to guide her towards the elevator and down to the parking lot.  

“How are you feeling?” she asked as she adjusted the driver’s seat of the rental car.

“Alright, considering.  Looking forward to getting home and finding out if my mollies survived the zombie apocalypse.”

“Could… could we talk, first?  At my place?”

His gut fizzed and his mouth grew dry, but he simply nodded, and said “Yeah.  Wake me when we get there.”

Scully’s apartment was its usual haven of soft upholstery and oak furniture.  He sat on her sofa and watched her go about her routine; putting the kettle on to boil, stashing her garment bag behind her closet door.  She seemed ill at ease, but it wasn’t directed at him.  With patience learned over the previous seven years, he waited until she was ready to say what was on her mind.

“I need to ask you something, Mulder, and I’m afraid of what it might mean to us.”

“Are you mad at me?  Because of earlier?”  Off her confused look, he specified, “The kiss.”

“No, I’m not mad.  I’m glad you kissed me, Mulder.  It was sweet.  Overdue.  But it reminded me that there is still some unfinished business between us that needs to be attended to before… well, before.”

He nodded, unsure where she was going.

“You’ve told me about your past relationships.  Fifteen.  Fifteen lovers.”

“Yes.”

“And I need to know why you didn’t tell me about Marita.”

He sat up straighter and looked her in the eye where she stood across the room.

“I never slept with Marita, Scully.  She made it pretty clear she was open to the idea, but it was such a strange time.  I was working with Ian and trying to be better, and well, I never took her up on it.”

This only seemed to make Scully more agitated, and a terrible idea began to form.

“Did someone tell you I’d slept with her?  Is that what you meant, when you called me a hypocrite after Philadelphia?  Because they were lying, Scully.  I don’t know how to make you believe me, but the last time I had intercourse was while you were missing.  I told you about it, and about how afterwards Elizabeth put me in touch with Ian, and I started to see him after you came back.”  He was speaking with the fervour of a condemned man, and Scully just looked more and more sad.

“I saw… on the paperwork for the IVF… you filled in 1994 where they asked about your last sexual partner, and I knew.  I should have told you right away.”

“What?  You’re scaring me, Scully.”

Instead of answering him, she went to her desk, opened the bottom drawer, and withdrew a VHS tape.  She handed it to him as though it was radioactive.

“This was delivered to me, not long after you came back from Russia.  It’s a recording.  Of you.  And Marita.”

He shook his head as though trying to dislodge a pest.

“Then it’s a fake, Scully.  I went to her apartment in New York with Krycek.  I told you that.  She was the one who arranged for my visa into Russia.  But I never…” He trailed off, memories surfacing.

“I know it’s you, Mulder.  There’s audio.  You, ummm, you call out my name.”

“Jesus.”  He was numb.  Paralyzed with confusion and anger and mortification.

“You don’t remember, do you?  Whatever she did to you, it was without your consent.”

“I remember falling asleep on her couch while we waited for the visa.  I had a strange dream.  Something about the Arctic, being cold.  When I woke up I was disoriented, several hours had passed, and the visa had arrived.  That’s…  what’s on the tape, Scully?  I need to see, right now.”

Knowing there was no use in arguing, Scully loaded the disk into her machine.  The picture was grainy.  The camera must have been positioned behind gauzy drapes.  But there was nothing wrong with the audio.  By the time his younger self came, he was fighting the urge to vomit or throw something substantial at the television   Scully’s hand on his thigh brought him back inside himself.

“I think we both know what this is about, Mulder.  Somebody wanted to drive us apart, and this video was the wedge.  And I wouldn’t be surprised if they were harvesting your, uh, genetic material at the same time.  She rushes from the room, right after you, um, ejaculate.”

“My genetic... I don't understand, Scully.  But it almost worked.  You were so angry with me, and I couldn’t understand why.  I mean, I was being a pigheaded asshole, but no more than usual.  And then Ed Jerse, and…”

“But it didn’t work.  We’re here now.  And we can try to bring her to justice.”

“There’s no restitution with these people, Scully.  Our victory is that we’re still here.”

“Together.”

“Yes.  Together.”

They sat in silence in her darkened living room as the first hours of the newborn millennium fell backwards into history.  He wondered if the Y2K prognosticators hadn’t been right, in some metaphysical sense.  His life to date and all the struggle and masochism it entailed seemed part of another world; one he would gladly leave behind to start with a clean slate, here in her cozy Georgetown apartment.

“It’s late,” she remarked, breaking his contemplation.

“Hmmm.”

“You could, umm, you can stay here.  If you want.”

Without asking, he knew what she was proposing.  It was tempting.  So very tempting.  A symbolic rebirth to mark the moment where everything that could hurt him had been exposed in the tiny universe made up of the two of them.  But using sex to bury the past was a hallmark of his old self, in that before-world.  If he was starting fresh, he was doing it right.

“Not tonight, Scully.  I want… it’s got to be about moving forward.  Not looking back.”

He was worried she’d be hurt by his rejection, but one look in her eyes and he knew she understood.  She understood better than anyone.

“Plus, I rather enjoyed our baseball date.  Maybe I want another one.  A little more fondling over sporting equipment.  A whole lot of flirting.  Maybe I’m the kind of guy who doesn’t give it up that easily.”

She snorted to indicate her opinion on his latest wild theory.

“You’ve given me a lot of anecdotal evidence that says otherwise, Mulder.”

He knew she was teasing, but he clarified anyway.

“This is different, Scully.   This is the one time I’m going to get it right.”

***

Flirting with Scully was fun.  Slowly exploring her exquisite body even funner.  Their work was dire, isolating and dangerous, and despite what their colleagues might believe, they were both consummate professionals.  But even a harrowing case left small cracks through which a little pleasure could creep.  They still challenged, disagreed, bifurcated and reunited at a common conclusion.  The only difference was now their bodies leaned, glanced, parted and pleased all the while.

***

After shooting Donnie Pfaster, Scully hid in his apartment for three days.  The ostensible reason was that her place was a crime scene.  In truth, she came to his home to look for herself.  The foundations of her moral edifice had been shaken, and he was her bedrock.  He was humbled, and he made a quiet space for her in his previously forsaken bedroom.  They co-habitated chastely until their final night, when Scully grabbed the remote, extinguished the Knicks’ game mid-third quarter, dug her little knees into the buttery leather of his sofa on either side of his hips, and kissed his proverbial socks off.

“Thank you, Mulder,” she breathed as they finally broke for air.

“Three days of remembering to put the toilet seat down seems a small price to pay, if you’re going to keep kissing me like that.”

“I’d like to thank you properly for sacrificing your comfortable new bed for three nights, but it’s-”

“Not the right time, I know.”

“It’ll happen, Mulder.  Knowing us, at the least likely, inopportune moment.”

“I have a dentist appointment next Wednesday.  Nice reclining chair.  Bright lights.  Access to laughing gas.”

She shook her head in mock dismay, rust-coloured tendrils sweeping across his upturned face.  He tapped her lightly on her ass.

“Until then, you’d best be getting off my lap, Miss Scully.”

***

There was a certain inevitability to his mother’s death, and in wrapping up his near-thirty year quest to find out what happened to Samantha.  The Fox Mulder who measured the distance covered by every day and decision against the yardstick of his past failures had entered chrysalis shortly after meeting Dana Scully.  He emerged now, with the heavy weight of his guilt molting away and leaving him fledgling and raw.

He could sense Scully’s concern for him.  He wished he could explain how his grief, once given voice, left him feeling purged and new.  Reborn.

***

He yo-yoed between fear for her safety and anguish that the ground had once again shifted beneath the precarious balance of his trust.  When she finally re-appeared and told him her story of willing complicity with the Smoking Man, he made sure to keep a wide expanse of floor between them, for fear that he would start shaking her and never stop.

“I had to do it, Mulder.  I wish there had been another way, and I tried to get a message to you.”

“What did he promise you?  What made the risk worthwhile?”

“I told you.  A cure for cancer.”

“As altruistic as you are, Scully, you’re also not a fool.  You might have wished that CancerMan had access to that kind of medical breakthrough, but you wouldn’t have bet your life on it.  No, there was something else.  Something you don’t want to tell me about because it says too much about your motivations.”

“You really are too smart for your own good, Mulder.”   She sighed, and seemed resigned to the fact that he wasn’t going to let this issue drop. 

“It’s been remarked upon before.  Come on, Scully.  Tell me the secret, selfish payoff that he duped you with.  A private parking spot at Hoover?  A limitless shoe budget?

“A baby,” she whispered, and he choked on the sharp bone of his arrogance.

“Jesus, Scully.  How… he didn’t…god, Scully, please tell me he didn’t…” Now he was dizzy with panic and guilt.

“No, Mulder.  Nothing like that.  He said… he said he wanted to give us something back.  Something that had been stolen from both of us.”

For once in his life, he had no words.  The anguish and hope and rage and love that swirled in him like galaxies took away his voice, and he grasped her hand instead and simply held on.

***

He’d wanted to take Scully to England.  He’d pictured her, her Celtic features and Old World reserve, there amongst the hedgerows and cobble stones.  It would be an exorcism of sorts - replacing the ghosts of his memories with her familiar presence.

He understood her unwillingness to play into his schemes, though.  Despite their nearly symbiotic relationship, they were still very different people.  His obsessions were not her own, and she had autonomy stamped on her DNA.  She said “take a bath”, but what she meant was “not be subsumed by the enormity of your beliefs”.

They parted at Dulles with a lingering kiss.  As enjoyable as having her accompany him would have been, having someone to come back to was even better.  But the Scully he returned to several days later was different.  Transformed, although still intrinsically her.   Over tea she spoke, quietly and deliberately, about the unlikely path that had led her to him.  He marveled at the parallel and meandering journeys two dissimilar people could take to a place where the only answer to the existential “why?” was each other.  

She fell asleep on his sofa, trusting and emptied of doubt, and he covered her and retired to his bedroom.  Once a symbol of ascetic denial, his bed now lay patiently awaiting the conclusion of their story.  He would never feel deserving of Scully, any more than a wave was deserving of the shore.  She was the only journey’s end that he could imagine, the only one he’d ever know.   She was the porch light to his roaming soul.

Content in that knowledge, he drifted just beyond consciousness.  Soft feet padded to the edge of his dream.  He opened his eyes to find Scully standing beside his bed, a corona from the soft glow of the living room haloing her nude form.  His skin crackled under a wash of adrenaline.

“It feels like the right time to do this the right way,” she whispered, touching his warm cheek.

“Yes.”  And he lifted the sheets and welcomed her in.

* * *

Love is a mirror that reflects what it finds.  When it’s right - fated, enduring - it radiates the light it sees outward into infinity, like the stars.


End file.
